APM social media

Social Media for Business

Do you have a social media strategy for your business? If you do, that’s great! There’s no better way to ensure maximum success for your social media efforts. A social media strategy sets out clear indicators for you and your team as to what the social media will look like, which platforms you will use, the types of messages you want to put out there and of course, who you are reaching out to.

You can follow our 8 Step Process to devising your social media strategy here.

However, just having the social media strategy, unfortunately, isn’t enough. You’ll also need a mechanism to evaluate the success of the strategy to ensure your efforts aren’t in vain and that you are receiving a return on your investment whether that’s in time or money.

So, how do you evaluate your strategy? The key is to define your critical success factors at the beginning, as part of the social media strategy (See our 8 Step Process). What these critical success factors will look like very much depends on what you as the business owner, want to achieve from the social media.

Here are some questions you need to ask yourself:

  • What are you looking to achieve: an increase in website traffic? Increased online visibility? More interaction? Improved brand presence online? More sales?
  • How much time and effort are you willing to give to the social media activities?
  • Will you be recruiting a member of staff or outsourcing the activity? How much will they cost?

Once you have the answers to these questions you can define the methods of measuring and evaluating the outcomes.

Single or Multiple Social Media Platforms?

Should you be using one or multiple platforms? There is no right or wrong answer to this. The answer will come through a detailed assessment of your target audience during the social media research phase.

The key is to understand where your ideal customers ‘live’ on social media. Are they mostly on Facebook? Do they prefer to tweet or are they more B2B focused and spend their time on LinkedIn?

Once you have this knowledge, you can decide where to focus your social media efforts.

How Useful are Analytics?

Throughout your social media campaign, it is essential to review the analytics. Why? Well, you need to know whether your content is being read by your target audience and that they are interested in what you have to say.

Poor quality content, sent out at the wrong time to the wrong audience, is worse than having no content at all. If you use a scheduling tool such as Hootsuite or Buffer there are a range of reports which will help you to analyse the social media performance. The reports will provide information such as how many people reacted to the post, liked/shared and retweeted the post, the top performing post, increase in followers and so on. Don’t ignore the reports – they can help you to tweak your social media campaigns to achieve maximum success.

If you regularly receive stats from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram then it’s important to understand what these stats mean. You are looking for ‘reach’ and ‘engagement’. In simpler terms this means how many people saw the post, liked, shared, commented and re-tweeted the post.

Create your own Social Media Strategy

If you’d like to learn more and create a social media strategy for your business, follow our 8 Step Process here; you’ll find a series of articles we wrote for LinkedIn identifying the eight simple steps for you to work through quickly and easily, with simple questions and exercises to help get you started.

You can also view our PowerPoint Presentation from a recent ‘Shop Talk’ here.

If you’d like to find out how Alison Page Marketing can help your business grow, please continue to browse our website and why not take a look at our testimonials while you’re here, to find out what others have to say about us. Alternatively, email us at hello@alisonpagemarketing.co.uk.