How effective is social media in driving my business? This question has been on many marketers’ minds for years and was the spur to why we created effectiveness.agency, to help marketers define the exact impact social media marketing has on their business.
In this blog post, we will be discussing how you can measure your social media effectiveness and what to do if it’s not working for you. We’ll also go over some tips on making sure that your posts reach their full potential.
What is social media?
Social Media is a term to describe technology that uses the internet and various devices (computers, tablets, smartphones) to create an online social network. Examples of social media platforms are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Linked In, and Youtube.
The key concept of social media is interaction amongst individuals, sharing content.
Types of content shared on social media include images, videos, and text uploaded by the user, in short form (a few words or an individual picture) or long-form (multiple paragraphs, videos, or albums of images).
These social media platforms help create an online community where users can interact outside their physical communities with other users who share a common interest or a common life event.
Social Media has led to many changes in how people communicate- we now share our thoughts through status updates, post pictures on Instagram or take video chats using Skype. Social media penetration, the number of people with a social media profile, is 78% of the population.
How to use Social Media for Business
Since social media’s inception in 2004, it has been recognized as one of the most powerful tools available for achieving marketing goals.
New Opportunities for Business in Social Media
Social media has created new opportunities for companies trying to increase their customer base: businesses can advertise their products directly through Facebook ads, build up followers on Twitter who will receive special deals from businesses, or send out messages about your latest blog posts via LinkedIn groups (to name just a few).
There are several types of industries where Social Media Marketing can have great success: Retailers who want their products seen by more people; Who wants increased customer engagement through better interactions with customers; Services providers such as beauty salons looking for new clients.”
Growth of business opportunities on Social Media
According to Forrester Research, the growth of business using social media has been significant, with over 30% of social media users reporting they have purchased a product or service as a result. This means that businesses using social media are three times more likely to receive a sale than those that do not do social media advertising.
Research has shown that when a brand is active on social networks, they are more likely to reach their target audience, leading them to make purchase decisions. Indeed, companies such as Dell have reported “a 200% increase in Web traffic from Facebook” due largely to its well-executed Social Media strategy, including contests like “The $1000 Contest.”
Success on Social Media
Despite some clear examples of success with Social Media by businesses and brands, not all Social Media Marketing is successful, with the effectiveness of Social Media being questioned by many.
Social Media success is dependent on the type of company and its target audience. Some industries, especially health & beauty products, can build their brands entirely on Social Media. In counterpoint, many “business to business” (B2B) brands do not find consumer-facing social media, like Facebook, as effective social media. A B2B audience is more suited for something like LinkedIn. Even then, a B2B social media presence is more likely to drive traffic, links for search, and generate leads rather than outright sales. Basically, the platform defines the audience.
Social media also offers opportunities for brands to create new content that will make them more culturally relevant to the younger demographic target audience while at the same time appealing to an older generation who may be unfamiliar with it.
Social Media Drives traffic to your website.
Social Media can drive traffic to your website, directly with referrals or indirectly through link building (part of digital marketing’s SEO). Linking your social media to your site increases the links, which (some) search engines count towards the authority for your site.
Driving Customer Satisfaction
Social media allows customer service to be direct with your customers through the social media platform called Social Customer Service. It allows for fast resolution of issues and shows all users how you value customer service and after-sales support.
Social media also opens up the opportunity for a relatively new form of insight on customers, called social listening. Social listening is the capability to understand what social media users say about your brand or a specific issue. Social listening gives you the ability to respond to individual consumer’s issues before it a big issue and show you care about your customers.
Social media is one way of marketing your business. If you are considering using social media to grow your company, it is best to think about the type of business you want to drive and what kind of customer base compliments your product or service offerings as effective. Remember, the audience drives the platform and chooses accordingly. You will want to choose a site where people interested in what you offer are spending time- Twitter for techies? LinkedIn for professionals? Facebook for moms with kids? Pinterest for home inspiration?
What is social media marketing?
Social Media Marketing is the discipline of marketing your business on social media.
Part of Digital Marketing
Social Media Marketing is one form of Digital Marketing. Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the internet. Digital marketing may include Social Media, website design, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Email Marketing or Texting.
Digital marketing is sometimes called online marketing because it uses the internet and other new technologies to reach a specific audience.
Social Media marketing works in one of four ways, and even then, these can be combined: by directly stimulating a specific audience to make a purchase; or by managing customer service over social media; or by getting the word out about a product or service to a particular target audience in a highly cost-effective manner; or by generating links to your digital site.
How to develop your social media marketing strategy
A good social media marketing strategy will be based on the needs of your business, not just what’s popular or trendy at that moment in time.
Audit Existing Business Social Media
The first thing is to audit your presence on social media and review previous social media marketing strategies. Is your business on social media currently? What social media platforms is it on? Has your business increased traffic on social media over time? How effective is your current social media presence? What do our social media profiles currently say about our products and services? What content have you used? How much of our products and services do we currently sell through Social media? How much of our site traffic on our website comes from Social media, i.e., our inbound traffic from social platforms? Are we responding to customers online, tracking satisfied customers and intervening when they’re not satisfied? Have we generated leads from Social Media? Have we been able to increase brand awareness? How many leads have led to conversion, i.e. how good quality are these leads and do they convert into profitable sales? How integrated is our social media activity into our digital marketing strategy? For example, are our social media links helping drive our search performance? Are our social platforms offering links to support our ranking for search engine optimisation?
Social Media Follower Brand Planning
As part of the auditing process, look to understand how you would classify your followers on the marketing funnel to offer complimentary content to the type of follower. Loyal customer may want a different message to potential customers. We discuss this further here.
Competitors’ Social Media Marketing Audit
The second part of the audit is to look at competitors on social media. What is their social media presence? What social media platforms are they on? How do they link the
Following the audit, we now need to understand what we want to identify the goals you want to achieve from Social Media, such as increased sales and brand awareness. Define your target audience, and especially the Social Media Channels your target audience uses – do they mainly use Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
Social Media Marketing – Content
Once you have defined your social media channels as part of your social media marketing strategy, focus on the types of content, especially quality content, required to meet your objectives. You should also bear in mind different social media channels have different content rules. For example, LinkedIn has strict guidelines about using images.
To market your company’s products or services on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, you should post regular (some would even say daily!) updates about your brand or business. Depending upon your type of business, this might be new information such as new products launched or discounts available at your company through these platforms. It might be the more emotional type of posts that connect with the feelings of your brand, that help people understand what your brand stands for, creating an emotional bond with followers.
When developing content, you want to understand how likely the content will generate leads and/or sales. Does the content have a call to action that helps in the marketing funnel? Is it for specific social platforms, and if so, what are the rules or best practice on each platform?
Content Timing
It is also important to think about the timing of your content and how often you post it – for example, should you be posting once a day or every hour? You will need to test to see what works best for your business.
You may also need to consider your social media marketing programme, especially in the earlier stages, to amplify your posts beyond your existing followers by using advertising on social media. This article from Forbes says, “45% of all marketers reported using paid advertising such as sponsored posts or ads.” This means you can allocate funds towards strategies like this if they align with company goals.
The effectiveness of Social Media is also dependent on the type of content being shared and how regularly it’s posted, with some studies finding that “companies who post four or more times per day to Facebook see an average increase in their total fan count by 100%.”
There are many ways businesses use social media marketing today, but some techniques that might work well for one type of product won’t necessarily apply to another. You will need to learn as you go what works and what doesn’t.
Social media marketing versus non-digital marketing
Social media marketing is considered highly cost-effective versus other media.
The cost of advertising to specific consumers are meagre compared to traditional media. The cost can be in pence per thousand range, although you should expect to pay under £10 per thousand for social media advertising, where you broadcast a message to non-followers.
Measurement
Unlike more traditional media such as TV advertising or radio advertising, or print advertising, you can measure social Media Marketing. We can track how many consumers have seen a post, who has engaged with an image and shared a post. Social media marketing is the new way to create and share content with your customers, so you can communicate and keep them updated on what’s going on with your business.
Targeted
Again unlike traditional media, social media can be very highly targeted at the specific demographic target audience, based on the groups, affiliations, and other personalised data held about users on Social Media. Traditional media, such as TV advertising or Outdoor media, is less targeted than social media marketing.
What can marketing objectives social media marketing drive?
Whether social media marketing is for your business or not needs to be considered about what you want to achieve in your marketing, otherwise known as your marketing objectives.
Marketing objectives have been developed based on how people shop and engage with brands over time.
Marketing objectives are tangible targets for specific marketing activity. Common marketing objectives include awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, relevancy, and advocacy.
List of marketing objectives
Marketing awareness is the process of creating interest in a brand. Awareness is created through marketing communications and public relations activities that increase the visibility of an organization’s products, services, and messages.
Brand awareness and consideration are complementary: they aim to make potential customers aware of your brand so they can consider it when making purchases. Consideration would be measured by how likely someone is to buy a specific product.
Conversion refers to whether people have actually bought the product and become customers.
Loyalty means retaining customers over time to ensure repeat business with your brand.
Advocacy is the extent to which customers speak favourably about the company, brand, helping to recruit other consumers to the product through word of mouth. Word of mouth is one of the most effective marketing communications.
To measure the success of marketing campaigns and programs for social media, we must have a baseline of the current objective and measure the difference caused by the content.
Pros of Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing has the potential to accurately and quickly identify what customers want, even if they don’t know it themselves.
When people interact with a company’s social media content, their interactions can be tracked, which helps determine an individual’s preferences based on their personal interests. This type of information is more accurate than aggregated demographics because you get feedback from individuals instead of groups.
Social media marketing is that it is an inexpensive form of marketing and will reach a wider audience. Social Media also allows for new opportunities like conversations with your customers in real-time.
As Social Media Marketing is highly cost-effective and also able to be tracked, there is a feeling that social media marketing is more effective than traditional marketing communications.
Cons of Social Media Marketing
The first con of using social media for marketing is that it requires more time than other types of advertising like TV or radio ads. You’ll need to spend hours each day building up followers as well as posting updates about your company or blog articles. The second drawback to this type of marketing is that it could have ramifications throughout all areas (reputation, trust, etc.) if something goes wrong in one area. For example, an off-handed comment by someone from Starbucks may put some people off coffee shops.
The cons are that people may not always remember content they see on their newsfeed, but this may be the case with traditional marketing. They may not attribute great content to your brand; again, the same is the case with traditional marketing.
Content will generally be ignored on Social Media, even the best content, as people glide through their timeline, dual screening or filtering out only what truly interests them. Most engagement rates are measured in single-digit percentages!
As social media is still in its relative infancy, it is difficult to predict what social marketing strategy will work. The industry is still learning about what makes effective content, as the brands, social media platforms, and users are all different.
The users themselves may not be truthful on their social media profiles. They may have out of date information on their profiles or hide their details for a range of different reasons. So social media marketing may not be as targeted as it appears. That being said, the vast majority of users are truthful, and their behaviour online can be verified.
Social media rules and terms & conditions are constantly evolving, meaning that what was previously allowed, perhaps even seen as best practice, can suddenly, and without warning, change and be outlawed, meaning you have to start from scratch all over again.
How effective is social media marketing?
Social media is not a one size fits all solution for marketing campaigns. When it comes to effectiveness in social media, many factors play into the success of your campaign: who you’re targeting, what content you post and when/how often throughout the day posts go live (the best time to post on Facebook.
What metrics should be used for social media marketing effectiveness?
You can measure the effectiveness of social media in different ways: by evaluating how many people they reach, the number of people who like their page on Facebook, followers on Twitter and other metrics that show just how much awareness is being generated for your business.
Traditional metrics for Social Media Marketing are clickthrough rates, conversion rates and engagement.
Click-through rate is the percentage of readers who click on a link in an email or social media post that directs them to your website.
Engagement happens when people like share, comment on or retweet content from your page.)
The conversion rate is calculated by dividing total sales for a particular period (month) by the number of visitors during that same period.
Limitations on Metrics
Unfortunately, there are limitations for Conversion rate, as it is only appropriate for wholly online businesses. Conversion rates are always an estimate for businesses that operate in both online and bricks & mortar retail, rather than an exact metric.
The above metrics may correlate with traditional marketing metrics such as awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. Still, they don’t actually demonstrate how social media is contributing to these marketing objectives.
But Social Media Marketing currently cannot demonstrate an increase in brand awareness using the above metrics. Other metrics such as customer satisfaction, brand authority, brand loyalty, or brand recognition are outside of the scope of most Social media marketing effectiveness methodologies.
Robust Social Media Effectiveness
We developed effectiveness.agency specifically to measure the effectiveness of all forms of content marketing from Public Relations to advertising on social media.
Because we talk a robust and scientific methodology to measuring effectiveness, you can be assured of how well your social marketing content meets your marketing objectives, even if they are traditional metrics such as awareness, consideration, conversion, brand loyalty, or advocacy.
Summary
Social Media Marketing is the act of marketing products or services to customers through social media. It can take many forms, from posting on Facebook and Twitter to creating a YouTube video for your business. The effectiveness of these types of ads depends largely on how much time you spend developing a strategy that will work for you and how well it’s executed. To get started, we recommend considering these four steps before diving into any social media campaign: 1) Define what success looks like; 2) Identify your audience; 3) Develop an effective content plan; 4) Create measurable goals with metrics – Our team at XYZ Company has helped clients across all industries find success using our expertise in digital marketing strategies tailored specifically.