Social media has become an important factor in any businesses marketing arsenal. You simply cannot get the kind of exposure and reach that’s needed today to grow the bottom line without a presence on social media.
Meeting interested prospects, spreading awareness about your products and services, and driving SEO for your own website, are all key reasons to get on social media and start engaging. The thing is, anyone can start a social media account but using it properly as a marketing tool is what truly helps businesses to transform. Posting random content for example, won’t have the same effect as being strategic about what you say and what links and images you use to drive those conversions.
You can even take it a step further on some social media platforms and add advertising dollars to help increase views and reach. All of this however, will mean nothing if you can’t measure its effectiveness and use those findings to continue to grow.
As with any good strategy in business, data analysis and future-planning are required. By adding this element to your social media marketing plan and you will be able to use the platforms with purpose.
Some of the necessary statistics and information about your presence on the channels could come from the native sites themselves. Today though, with the importance of social media for businesses becoming more apparent, that’s simply not enough. If you really want to drill down to the key data that’s most important to your business and goals, you’re going to need something more specialized. That’s where social reporting tools like Sprout Social, Buffer, and Hootsuite can help businesses become a leading force in the social hemisphere.
These tools offer the ability to post on multiple sites at one time, so you can reach as many people as possible. You can also pre-load posts, time them, and monitor activity in real-time across these platforms.
For some businesses, being responsive to customer inquiries and comments on social is detrimental. For others, knowing that a post that’s promoting their latest blog is being shared and commented on constantly, is just the insight they need to focus their future product development efforts. The possibilities of what to do with the insights gained is endless.
Actionable data such as the number of clicks, comments, and shares a business posts is important when building a strategy that will deliver. A social reporting tool can display this information in a visually beneficial way where you can compare performance across different channels. This data can shift your focus to the channels with best results and even help you to pinpoint what content resonates best with your audience so you’re not making the mistake of just posting to post.
A dashboard with metrics about post performance is great, but access to information about your actual followers can offer an even more focused way to target your posts. Data such as the location your followers are from, what time of day they are more active, and other demographics, can serve as a way to further discover and target the right prospects.
While it’s true social media should never be an afterthought, the reality is that most businesses don’t have the dedicated resources to focus on everything required for continual success. New social media reporting tools take the manual and time-consuming tasks out of tracking metrics and building reports. They do the work for you, so you can focus on using the data to improve business results.
At Zero Gravity Marketing we build social strategies for clients from scratch by thoroughly evaluating your current efforts and developing a specific plan to meet your social media marketing goals. Contact us today to get started today!