As of this moment that I’m writing for you, the major social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube, Snapchat, and the one that has caused significant noise out there, Tiktok.
Brief Overview of Social Media Marketing
Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing
1. Strategy
2. Planning and Publishing
Social media planning might look different from business to business. Primarily, social media for small businesses might require persistent content delivery since the budget might be tight on ad spends. The focus might be more on organic delivery rather than paid ads. The more you post on social media, the higher your chance of discovering your future customers will be. The good news is, there are over 3 billion users on social media. While not all will be in your target group, your business will have a better chance of broadening its reach and capture more attention. Also, unlike more traditional ways of advertisement, you have analytics within your reach. You can learn from trials and errors and improve your content daily.
Publishing on social media can be as simple as sharing a blog article from your website, posting an image or a video just as you might do on your social media accounts. However, to be effective, plan ahead of time, create your content calendar and always…post great content that can benefit your audience with an effective time and frequency in mind.
There are social media management tools out there that can help you post more effectively and more frequently to spend more time planning and less time scheduling content.
3. Listening and Engagement
You have done your homework, created an effective social media strategy, planned your engaging content, and posted it. Now, your brand is growing. People are having conversations about your product, commenting on your social media posts, tagging you on their posts or stories, even messaging you directly.
People might even talk about your product or brand without notifying you. Social listening will allow you to keep up with the conversation, whether outside of your vision. If it’s a positive conversation, you can drop by as a friendly business and surprise them with your appreciation. On the other hand, if your business received negative comments by utilizing social listening, you can engage with those unhappy customers and remedy their hardship.
4. Analytics and Reporting
Social Media KPIs should be tied to your SMART goals.
SMART goals can help you stay on track and commit to your goals and the consistency of the work. Here are some KPIs that you might want to consider tracking for your business:
Reach KPIs
These KPIs measure how many people your social media channels can reach. The reach can both be a passive interaction with your channel or engagement with your posts.
Impressions
This KPI measures how many times your post was visible to someone either on their feed or timeline. It doesn’t mean that the person actually interacted with the post or even saw it.
Follower Count
This KPI tracks the number of people that are following your social media channels.
Audience Growth
You also want to keep track of your growth percentage. Essentially how much and by what speed you are growing your follower base.
Potential Reach
This KPI measures the potential number of people who could see your post during a certain reporting period. This is a great measurement to use to calculate the potential reach your post may have if someone shares your post with their network. Your outreach in that case goes beyond your normal capabilities and we can consider 2% to 5% of their followers as your additional reach.
Side note here, you can see the importance of delivering engaging, valuable, and relevant content here. The more you leave a positive impact on your audience, the more chance you have to expand on your reach.
Social Share of Voice
This metric is used to track how many people are mentioning your brand and compares it to the number of people that are mentioning your competitors.
This is a good metric to keep track of because it shows the relevancy and success of your brand in the digital realm. You may use social media listening tools to measure your mentions within a certain timeframe.
Social Media Engagement KPIs
These KPIs are a set of metrics that track your engagement and quality of the interactions across the board. Some of the clear KPIs in this realm are likes, shares, comments.
Other than the 3 mentioned above here are some other KPIs to consider for your engagements:
Applause Rate
Applause rate only tracks the positive interactions made by people. For example, if someone likes, saves, retweets, or favorites a post.
To calculate the applause rate, use the formula below:
Average Engagement Rate
This metric shows on average how many people are engaging with your posts.
5. Advertising
Lastly, you may go the paid advertising route if you have the budget and funding to grow your social media marketing on different channels. Social media ads allow you to expand your reach outside your network of followers.
Social Media platforms have powerful advertising platforms that allow you to target audiences specifically for your business needs based on demographics, interest, behavior, and more.
Due to recent Apple iOS 14.6 updates that allow the users to opt-in or out of their information being tracked, social media platforms like Facebook might see massive changes to their advertising capabilities, along with their measurement and reporting capabilities. Therefore, it is best to focus on growing your network organically before getting started on paid ads. Specifically, if you are tight on budget, we will expand on this iOS update in later posts.
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