Set objectives for your social media marketing:

  1. Why are you/will you be using social media for business? Is it to drive traffic to your website? Is it to generate leads? Is it to improve brand recognition? Will you want to provide customer service? Would you like to conduct market research?
  2. What messages do you want to convey via social media marketing? Do you want to talk about a particular service? Let people know about a special offer? Show prospects and clients that you’re interested in what they have to say?
  3. Who are your target market? Think about their interests, their locations, their habits, their work. Where will  they be spending their time when they are online?
  4. How will you communicate with your target market? Formal or informal? How will you show your brand values whilst you are using social media for your business?
  5. When will you be posting updates on social media marketing? What time of day do you think that your target market will be online?

Once you’ve set your objectives, it will help you to determine how to measure whether social media is working for your business: Review your social media results at least weekly:

  1. Review your Google analytics to see if there is an uplift in traffic to your website. What areas of your site are now most visited? Is the uplift in traffic coming from social media?
  2. Record all incoming queries, and make sure that you ask each prospect that contacts your company where they heard about you
  3. Review your Facebook insights if using Facebook – here you can see whether you’re reaching your ideal market by demographic, and you can also test and measure which posts have the most engagement
  4. If you’re using Hootsuite to post to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google + etc,  be sure to check your analytics. You can see which posts had the best click through rates, and therefore you can determine which didn’t. This will help you decide what content to share, what to say about it, and the best time to post it.
  5. If you’re using social media for customer service, send out customer surveys at the end of any engagement, so that you can test how your customer’s feel about the service that they received.
  6. Measure the response to questions for market research by numbers and by quality.

When you regularly review the results of your social media marketing, it allows you to determine what changes should be made, what time is best to post, what content to share, and what to say to get maximum returns from the effort that you put into it.

If you want to optimise the use of your social media, contact us now to discuss what you want to achieve and how we can support you with that. Call us now on 01245 791969 or email [email protected]