Over the past decade, social media has become seriously involved in the way brands engage with customers and users. Big brands began using social media as much more than just as a tool to promote their products. It’s where brands use social media marketing to build relationships, drive real revenue, and yes, sometimes waste ad spend if they’re not careful. Independent business owners started using social media campaigns to engage their users, banks and product-selling companies broke the ice to use social media as a customer support system besides figuring out how to use it to collect reviews and surveys too.
Social media is a grand part of our lives. Billions of people use Facebook and Twitter (combined). The networks are so important today that even Google tries to capture social signals in ranking your webpages. As a webmaster, and an SEO ROI expert, if there’s one thing that you can’t miss in your cocktail, it’s social media marketing.
But does that mean you just post links and share interesting things on your social media platforms? Unfortunately, many websites assume just this and go about posting and sharing links to things they find interesting. Yet, there’s no “engagement,” no “likes,” no “retweets,” no “click-throughs” and basically not much of anything else either. Why?
Many teams focus on likes and shares, but struggle to connect those numbers to real business goals. That gap is exactly where better strategy, smarter tracking, and a bit of discipline come in.
Let’s walk through how to turn your Facebook and Twitter efforts into measurable, meaningful results.
You’ve probably heard this a million times before, but social media efforts is about three things, predominantly.
1. Content
2. Timing
3. Engagement
What you share – interesting or not, in the generic sense – is not exactly the reason why people don’t click, don’t share, don’t retweet; or in short, don’t engage. I’ve seen pages with followers in the mere hundreds engage voraciously and pages with thousands of followers remain relatively obscure. And they both share content that’s generally interesting. The reason?
The rules of content on social media are pretty much similar to the ones in a marketing copy.
Bit.ly (the URL shortening service that runs prominently on several social channels) posted about the best times to share content on social media. It’s one of the most important lessons you can apply to maximize your social media marketing efforts.
Time is relative so the sane way of interpreting this is to take into account the time zones of your followers and figure out the most common time zone. And the following doesn’t apply to “breaking news” kinds, obviously.
But it doesn’t end there. This is just a base template for you to start working on. Remember that the trends of social media tools are rapidly evolving. With mobile devices in tow, people spend more time on Twitter and Facebook in the dead zones too (after 4pm, after 8pm etc.)
Run a test on Twitter for a week. Share links every 3 hours. Figure out the results from social media analytics. Then, you’ll have an idea of what generates the highest clicks and when so you can calculate social media ROI, later on.
But of course, the hardest part of social media marketing campaigns is engagement.
Most social profiles of websites and brands that I see do very little to engage with their audiences, followers, and other social media team leaders in their niche. This is exactly the opposite of how you should use social media strategy.
Engagement is (broken down into the most basic ‘actionable’ steps you can take right away):
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Over the past decade, social media has become seriously involved in the way brands engage with customers and users. Big brands began using social media as much more than just as a tool to promote their products. It’s where brands use social media marketing to build relationships, drive real revenue, and yes, sometimes waste ad spend if they’re not careful. Independent business owners started using social media campaigns to engage their users, banks and product-selling companies broke the ice to use social media as a customer support system besides figuring out how to use it to collect reviews and surveys too.
Social media is a grand part of our lives. Billions of people use Facebook and Twitter (combined). The networks are so important today that even Google tries to capture social signals in ranking your webpages. As a webmaster, and an SEO ROI expert, if there’s one thing that you can’t miss in your cocktail, it’s social media marketing.
But does that mean you just post links and share interesting things on your social media platforms? Unfortunately, many websites assume just this and go about posting and sharing links to things they find interesting. Yet, there’s no “engagement,” no “likes,” no “retweets,” no “click-throughs” and basically not much of anything else either. Why?
Many teams focus on likes and shares, but struggle to connect those numbers to real business goals. That gap is exactly where better strategy, smarter tracking, and a bit of discipline come in.
Let’s walk through how to turn your Facebook and Twitter efforts into measurable, meaningful results.
You’ve probably heard this a million times before, but social media efforts is about three things, predominantly.
1. Content
2. Timing
3. Engagement
What you share – interesting or not, in the generic sense – is not exactly the reason why people don’t click, don’t share, don’t retweet; or in short, don’t engage. I’ve seen pages with followers in the mere hundreds engage voraciously and pages with thousands of followers remain relatively obscure. And they both share content that’s generally interesting. The reason?
The rules of content on social media are pretty much similar to the ones in a marketing copy.
Bit.ly (the URL shortening service that runs prominently on several social channels) posted about the best times to share content on social media. It’s one of the most important lessons you can apply to maximize your social media marketing efforts.
Time is relative so the sane way of interpreting this is to take into account the time zones of your followers and figure out the most common time zone. And the following doesn’t apply to “breaking news” kinds, obviously.
But it doesn’t end there. This is just a base template for you to start working on. Remember that the trends of social media tools are rapidly evolving. With mobile devices in tow, people spend more time on Twitter and Facebook in the dead zones too (after 4pm, after 8pm etc.)
Run a test on Twitter for a week. Share links every 3 hours. Figure out the results from social media analytics. Then, you’ll have an idea of what generates the highest clicks and when so you can calculate social media ROI, later on.
But of course, the hardest part of social media marketing campaigns is engagement.
Most social profiles of websites and brands that I see do very little to engage with their audiences, followers, and other social media team leaders in their niche. This is exactly the opposite of how you should use social media strategy.
Engagement is (broken down into the most basic ‘actionable’ steps you can take right away):
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