The relationship between a brand and consumer has changed dramatically thanks to the impact of social media. Top notch executives and business owners have understood that social media can make or break their business, so they have taken the opportunity to build a presence on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to do business. By using social media, companies now can create strategies after they analyze the analytics to understand the target consumer’s demands and likes/dislikes. Social media has given immense control and power to consumers and large corporations and well-known brands no longer have the so-called upper hand.
The Impact of Social Media on Your Business Results
There are major benefits of using social media to promote your brand. Some of them are:
- The growth of social signals: Your search engine optimization endeavor can be boosted to a large extent by social signals. Remember that the more people talk about your brand on social media, like, follow and recommend your brand page to others, the more chances of your web page to rising up in search ranking.
- Promoting company branding and consciousness: Social media users can always keep the memory of your brand alive in the minds of a vast number of people by sharing your page on their walls. This in the turn will create awareness about your product, which eventually will convert into more followers/customers.
- Do not underestimate word of mouth advertising: People tend to believe familiar people more than descriptions or reviews of your goods on your webpage. If you keep your current customers satisfied and happy, ultimately they will be the one who will promote your brand to their friends and acquaintances.
Social media has become a requirement for digital marketing because research shows that most consumers have a habit of spending a minimum of half an hour per day in various social media sites. This goes especially for small/medium businesses that are looking to create a niche in the market. Proper use of social media sites will give businesses the opportunity to offer tough competition to popular brands.
If you want social media to prove beneficial for you, then consider implementing the following tips that provided by BestWeb Technologies:
- Clearly define your business goals.
- Use analytics and insights to discover your audience demographics, preferences and activities.
- Taylor your message to your audience so that when you tell your story, it is relevant to the people you want to reach. Your message can include text, images and video.
- Optimize your posts to boost SEO and link to relevant, optimized landing pages on your website to drive traffic.
- Use social media as a listening tool. Listen. Respond. Repeat.
Measuring the impact of social media on business is crucial if you want to establish the true return you achieve on the money you’ve invested. Like any other aspect of your business, you want to keep track of how your campaigns perform to really appreciate the impact they can have on your business.
Here are a few ways you can track your social media marketing strategy:
Specific goals
Like with all strategies, start by coming up with a set of goals that you want to achieve. At the end of the week or month have a look to see how you’ve performed and review the actions that got you there.
Keep in mind that you’ll need to focus on the metrics that really matter to your business (KPI’s).If you sell something online, an increase in sales may matter more than how many people convert as a blog subscriber.
See if the metrics are valid
Sooner or later your social media campaign will focus on how the visitors are interacting with what you post and share. If you post something, do a lot of people comment on it or like it? If so, what are they saying?
Keeping a track of these things will allow you to judge ‘engagement’ and this is a valid metric for social media.Customer interviews and positive reactions to product launches can all be picked out as valid metrics.
Leading indicators
A leading indicator is one that shows you where things are likely to go in the future.
You have to keep an eye on them to see the results of your strategy materialize.
Pick a few metrics like the engagement, likes, click-through rate and page views to see how sales are likely to tick up in the near future.
Create a dashboard
We’ve pointed out a lot of metrics in all these points above, but you may need to collate all the data in one place if you really want to use it.
Try to create a dashboard to keep track of all the elements of your strategy.
Having all things in one place will not only help you make quick decisions, but better decisions.
Benchmark your work
The only way to see if you are moving forward is to set a starting point. Pick a meaningful benchmark to assess how well the social media campaign is doing.
The benchmark could vary depending on the goal: sales, lead conversions, organic traffic, brand awareness, etc.
Experiment
The A/B test is one of the most popular tests on the Internet and there are subtle ways you can pull it off on social media too. Try to test different ways to post the same thing and see which one gets a better response.
Maybe the one with the shorter title is clicked on more often or the photo of your product is an eye catcher. Use more of what works and less of what doesn’t, but always keep experimenting to find out both.
Put some money into it
Measuring the impact of your investment in social media is almost as important as marketing on social in the first place. The budget doesn’t need to be large, but put some time and effort into finding out the tools that can help you see the data in a new light and make changes to your strategy quickly. This could include hiring out an agency to partner with, hiring dedicated staff to take care of it for you or getting an expert to create a model from scratch.
Some engineering or social media experts may be able to build you models that are predictive.They analyze what has happened and tell you what is likely to occur. These models are incredibly useful when it comes to preparing for the future and running a successful, sustainable campaign.
This article is by no means exhaustive. It doesn’t cover everything you need to know about social media, but it does tell you all the essentials of social media marketing and getting more inbound business.
