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Is Your Social Media Working?
The Sprocket Report
You have no doubt read that social media marketing is the best thing since sliced bread. So you dedicated a significant amount of time to posting content or a significant amount of money for someone else to post. Now you’re wondering: Is any of this working?
Small business owners are valued for their ability to act quickly because there are fewer levels of management to consult. On the flip side, small biz owners sometimes jumps into the latest thing without consultation at all, which is what happened to many who are now questioning their social media investment.
While planning ahead can be difficult for the creative entrepreneur type, it’s truly the only way to know where you are going and how close you are to getting there. The questions you need to ask yourself are:
- What is the goal for your social media efforts?
- How will you track your progress toward the goal?
- Who is - and where can you reach - your target market?
- What is the strategy to follow?
What is the goal for your social media efforts?
Of course you want to make money, but except for a few specific industries, social media is not a sales tool. A more appropriate goal is to gather leads for pursuing sales. You are also building an online presence to support your sales efforts.
Prospective clients come from many places, including old-fashioned face-to-face networking. One of the first things people do these days is look at your online presence. If you haven’t tweeted since 2008, what kind of impression are you making about your organization?
But don’t just post links to other people’s content. You should be driving traffic to your own website. Decide on your leads goal - something like signing up for a newsletter or filling out a contact form - and make that your call to action in your social media.
How will you track your progress toward the goal?
You have to measure to know what’s successful and what’s not. Counting how many followers you gained is one measurement, but more importantly, how many of those followers signed up for your newsletter? How many arrived at your sign-up page but didn’t actually sign up? Armed with those statistics you can tweak your social media message and your web page’s call to action.
Who is your target market and where can you reach them?
“Everyone!” is always the wrong answer to “Who’s your target market?” LinkedIn might be a great place to talk about college spirit-wear, but will you find a community there interested in high school spirit-wear? Do some research and experiment.
What is the strategy to follow?
Start with what you know, test, tweak and test again.
For instance, let’s say you provide landscaping services. Your goals are to build a strong online presence and gather emails addresses for future marketing. Your research says women with young families most often make the decision to hire a landscaper and those women spend a lot of time on Pinterest. So you post some photos on Pinterest of The Ugliest Lawns in Mytown with a link to the web page on how they can email their own photos of ugly lawns. Check your analytics and tweak a bit. Was there an increase in visitors? Are you getting email addresses? What happens when you try Nexttown instead?
In traditional marketing, you’d buy space in a single edition of a newspaper and get one shot at your message. With social media marketing, you can reach out multiple times with different messages and easily measure your results as you go. With a little bit of research and strategy, not only can you know IF your social media is working – you can know how well!
Because social media is such an important tool for website promotion, we offer several levels of social media management services. Ask us today how we can help manage your social media marketing.
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Kate Gingold
I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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