Social media is a powerful marketing tool for modern businesses, and yet it is still possible to misuse it and end up wasting money.
To avoid this, you need to pay close attention to the ROI you achieve from your social media marketing efforts, so here are a few ways to enhance this if you are currently falling short of your targets.
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Use monitoring tools to track brand mentions
The importance of social media monitoring is multifaceted, and there are software tools which automate this process and ensure that you can easily detect when your brand is being mentioned.
With this data to hand you can do all sorts of things, from responding to customer queries, questions and complaints quickly, to seeing which topics are trending and determining how to take advantage of them.
The right tools will mean that you need to spend less time manually managing your social media presence, and can instead be more reactive and responsive while still having plenty of freedom to focus on your other responsibilities as well, which is clearly more cost-effective.
Set clear goals
One of the biggest obstacles to successfully using social media to market your business is that unless you know what you want to achieve, you will have a tough time measuring ROI in the first place.
Because of this it is important to sit down and figure out the aims and intentions behind your use of social media. This might be something as simple as driving more traffic to your website, or to generate leads and maintain relationships with existing customers.
Whatever the case, once you have had this conversation you can then go ahead and start analyzing the metrics that matter and calculating ROI accordingly.
Tweak your content
Connecting with people on social media is all about publishing the right type of content, and you could find that if your offerings miss the mark, then it is probably down to the fact that you are simply not connecting with your target audience.
You can harness the aforementioned monitoring tools to tap into the zeitgeist and determine the types of content that will hit home with the customers you are hoping to court with your social presence.
You can also pay attention to what influencers within your market and industry are doing to get a better idea of what audiences are into and what content is gaining traction at the moment, to inform your own creative endeavors.
Stick to a regular posting schedule
Even if your content is on point, it could sink without a trace if it is not being added to your timeline consistently enough.
Of course there is a balance to strike between publishing posts regularly, and not overloading your accounts with content too frequently to the extent that it can become an annoyance.
Once again it makes sense to delve into the data and work out where you are going wrong, not only as you begin your mission to improve ROI but after you have implemented changes as well. If an increase in posts brings in more visitors to your website, for example, this is to be celebrated, but if you pass a tipping point and this actually drops off, you should also take this into account when adjusting your strategies.
Make use of multimedia
Your social posts will be more engaging if they feature more than one type of content, whether that might be a video, an image, a GIF or an interactive poll.
In short, mix things up and keep things interesting to ensure that your social marketing budget is being put to good use.
