Social media is incredibly popular with customers; more specifically it’s popular with your customers, making a social media presence especially important for businesses. According to fastcompany.com, only 7% of marketing companies do not use social media as part of their campaigns, so with that statistic in mind it’s hard to argue just how important social media has become in the successful marketing of businesses.
From Twitter to Facebook to LinkedIn, social media will help you to reach a vast audience in a wonderfully short space of time. Reposts and retweets are excellent ways of building customer engagement with your business, and could lift your brand awareness to new heights by getting people talking about your company all across the globe.
And if you want to know the power that social media holds over your company, there are ways to monitor this via their metrics. Programs such as Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and SocialBro are all excellent ways of monitoring your social presence by keeping tabs on things such as customer engagement and visitor frequency. This blog will discuss a few social media platforms your company can explore if you are considering this avenue, and also some of the ways of tracking the progress of any interactions your business launches. Once you know how, social media really will prove itself to be an indispensable tool in the progress of your company.
Facebook
Facebook is one of the social media platforms that almost everyone has heard of. According to the Guardian website, Facebook boasted 1.2 billion users at the end of 2013 with 757 million logging on daily, and if previous trends are anything to go by, it’s a rate that grows monumentally each year.
By creating a Facebook page for your business, you are opening the doors to potentially reaching an epic audience that more traditional methods of advertising just cannot touch. This isn’t just due to the amount of users; Facebook have taken marketing one step further, making them an even more vital tool for a successful campaign.
The website is now offering a service where you can pay for ‘hyper targeted’ ads to be displayed on the site, which means your ads will reach the exact audience that you are targeting. This will ensure your ads are reaching the best audience for you and will undoubtedly drum up business, creating room for monumental growth in your brand and company.
Social Metrics
There are expediential social metrics to monitor on Facebook so you can gain an in-depth understanding of how your social media reach is progressing. These metrics include fan reach, click through rate, the ‘people are talking about this’ rate and more. Each of these metrics can be monitored on Facebook itself. An overview of click throughs can be found via the Page Insights and the Engaged Users option, which will tell you exactly how many people have clicked on your content.
Fan reach can be monitored by downloading an excel file from Facebook under Export Insights Data. The statistic you are after is listed under the column ‘Lifetime post reach by people who like your Page’, and from this you can wager how appealing your posts are to your fans, and whether you need to improve your content quality.
Getting people to talk about your brand is also key on Facebook. A way of tracking this is by going to your Insights Interface and looking at the statistics found below the column labelled ‘Talking about this’. From here, you can see how popular your posts are and once again, tailor them in a different way if they are not getting the views that you are after.
Twitter
Twitter is another social platform that is proving invaluable for social media marketing. Twitter has 248 million monthly active users according to businessinsider.com, and from this it is clear to see that Twitter is a highly frequented social media platform.
With a Twitter account you can gain excellent exposure for your business through its ample amounts of users, and it also allows you to provide an approachable side to your business, as Twitter is an incredibly personal way of connecting on social media. It will also encourage customer engagement and create a brand lift for your business.
Social Metrics
The Twitter Counter is an excellent way of monitoring the metrics of your Twitter account, and offers various options to find out about your presence on the site.
They offer three packages including one for individuals, one aimed at brands and the other at agencies. The brands option is the one most suitable for companies, and it allows users the opportunity to do the following:
- Measure the success of your content
- Evaluate your Twitter audience
- Generate one-click performance reports
Due to it’s ease of access, Twitter Counter makes this social media platform an invaluable tool when tracking the success of your social presence.
Other Social Media Metric Tracking Tools
There are, of course, plenty more social media platforms that your business can venture on to. But perhaps more important than the amount of sites is the monitoring of how well a core few are doing. There’s plenty of programs out there to do this, including the ones we have talked about above that are linked to the social platforms themselves.
But what about independent programs that can perhaps provide more information than the standard ones that Facebook and Twitter offer?
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is an excellent tool as it provides a live feed of the interactions made with your business. If you are a marketing company, this again is invaluable as it enables you to not only monitor the activities of one client, but actually it allows you to see real time updates for each of them.
Sprout social describes itself as, ‘A management & engagement platform for all social business,’ and comes with a variety of features including the option to monitor key words so you can keep an eye on what people are saying about your brand online. This is a vital metric to monitor, because if you know that people are saying positive things about your brand then you know you’re getting things right.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is another helpful tool for managing your social media presence and monitoring your metrics. It allows any company to organise their social media accounts into one, easy to use interface. They offer both Enterprise and Pro options, the latter of which also comes with a free 30 day trial.
The system, as well as being an excellent organisational tool, also comes with social media analytics which will prove vital if you are monitoring your social media strengths and weaknesses.
By using the program uberVU via hootsuite, you can get real time analysis of your social media presence, and with over 25 social media sites on hootsuite’s interface, you can be sure you will get an accurate readings of how well, or not so well, your social media presence is doing.
SocialBro
SocialBro is a marketing platform created for Twitter. Their website claims the software has a focus on four key areas of this social media platform, including audience targeting, your Twitter presence, your actions on Twitter as well as how to engage better with your followers.
The tool is incredibly useful as it allows you to perform a variety of takes including targeting people who will be interested in your business, as well as identifying your social media supporters. SocialBro can even let you know the best time to Tweet to your followers, help you to discover new users, monitor what your competitors are doing, as well as creating reports for your Twitter activity so you can discover areas in need of improvement.
Studying these social metrics are vital to the success of any social media campaign because it shows in real time where your campaign is falling down, allowing you to instantaneously improve it in order to get the most out of social media for your business.
To Conclude
With such a wealth of social media platforms and monitoring tools, it’s hard to ignore the need to branch out into this area of marketing and monitor the metrics. Not only will it increase the reach of your business, it could also help improve sales and provide a real-time insight into the response your brand is getting from the general public and potential/current customers.
So get involved in social media and see what rewards you can reap, and give your business the chance to access the heights it deserves.