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"Content is fire; social media is gasoline." – Jay Baer
Bestselling Author, Marketing Expert and Founder of Convince & Convert.
Having that awesome pdf without any visitors is like having a gas station that lacks customers. That's why when you think about content, it shouldn't be merely blogging or writing but also strategies for reaching people.
Social media is a wave that makes the sea of information move faster and without a well-crafted social media strategy you'll remain just a flameless brand, in other words, your brand won’t catch fire.
If you're still trying to figure out if marketing on social media is right for your business, we are here to tell you it is. It's a massive part of digital marketing.
According to Hubspot, 73% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a company that responds on social media
The modern customer wants to be known and heard. They want to interact with companies in real-time and on their terms. It's about listening rather than leading. In essence, you need to build a bridge between customers, the products or services you offer, and your company, and this should be the sole purpose of digital marketing.
There are tons of social media sites out there and with such a wide array of options how do you know where to focus your efforts? This blog will help you navigate that and arrest this dichotomy for good.
A good social media marketing strategy can help a brand build awareness, grow favorability, and improve customer satisfaction.
Because there are virtually a ton of platforms where your potential customers are likely to hang out such as Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tiktok it is imperative to know that each platform has its strengths and weaknesses.
As with all marketing channels, it's important to track the performance of your social media campaigns using the same metrics you would use for other types of marketing.
The metric that matters most depends on what your goals are; if you're trying to drive traffic to your website, then you'll want to look at things like reach and engagement rate (i.e. how many people saw the post and how much they interacted with it).
Here are a few important things you could track when you are employing social media marketing for your business:
Impression: A view of a post, tweet, or other content on a social media platform.
This metric is a bit tricky because a single user could still account for multiple impressions depending on how many times he/she saw your post in their feed. For a post to count as an impression, a user does not have to engage with it.
Impression data is available for Facebook Pages, Instagram accounts, and Twitter profiles.
The more impressions your post gets, the more people will see them — but most importantly for social media marketers, they'll be able to tell how many people saw their posts without actually clicking on them (which means they're not necessarily interested in what you're sharing).
As you'll see, Impression is a very important metric because it determines your ability to reach the right audience and can be extremely helpful in combination with engagement and reach.
On Facebook, impressions are classified into three categories:
Organic: the number of times your post appears in the users' feed or your page for free
Paid: the number of times your paid ad was shown.
Viral: the number of times users see content related to your page on your friend's story.
In Twitter, impressions are the number of times a tweet appears on the user’s feed.
In addition to impressions, you may want to know how many clicks you are getting on your online advertisement. That’s called an ad click, it is a metric that measures the number of times a user clicked on an ad.
Reach is the number of unique users who have seen your post.
Reach isn't the same thing as impressions, because it doesn't count multiple views from the same person.
The key difference between reach vs impressions is that reach takes into account the number of users who happened to see your post while impressions are focused on the number of times your post is getting displayed.
Reach on Facebook is differentiated into three categories:
Organic: the number of times your content appeared on the user's page or news feed for free.
Paid: The number of times your paid content appeared on a user’s newsfeed.
Viral: The number of times content was displayed because one of the user's friends interacted with it.
Instagram allows you to calculate reach in increments of 7, 14, and 30 days.
Here is an example to illustrate the difference - Say that you got 100 followers on Twitter. A tweet you post will be seen by these 100 followers, hence the reach is 100 and the impression is also 100.
When you tweet again, your tweet is going to be seen by 100 followers but this time, they will see both your tweets, hence the impression is 200.
Therefore it is not uncommon to see that impressions are always higher compared to reach because of the logic that is involved in calculating them.
Social media engagement is one of the most important metrics that digital marketers need to track on their dashboards. It's a measure of how much people interact with your content, and it's a great way to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
If you have engagement rates, it means people care about what you post and want to participate in the conversation. It also helps show that your content is interesting enough for people to want to share it with their friends and followers.
According to Hootsuite’s Social Media Metrics blog, you can calculate your engagement rate using the following formula
Engagement rate refers to the number of times people interacted with your content compared to how many times they saw it (i.e., impressions). For example, if someone saw 100 posts in their feed and liked three of them, then their engagement rate would be 3%.
If you have 100 followers on Twitter and 15 of them retweeted your post, then your engagement rate would be 15%.
Tip: You can track impressions, and engagement rate side by side for a given period, comparing it against the previous period using Dataflo’s dashboard.
Audience growth rate refers to the number of new followers gained by your business at a given point in time.
The audience growth rate percentage is calculated based on the following formula:
This number is relative to the number of total followers your business has. The more the number of existing followers, the harder it is to maintain a good audience growth rate consistently.
If you want to consistently improve your audience growth rate you can start with some simple steps as below -
The response rate in social media refers to the speed at which your business responds to comments and queries by customers on your social media handle. These are typically in the form of DMs (Direct Messages) or Comment mentions on the posts. Depending on the follower count, your response rate may differ.
Follower count is however not directly relative to your post’s virality and hence you can expect to adapt your response rate based on the level of engagement your post gets.
To calculate the response rate you will divide the total number of responses by the total number of mentions.
E.g. if you got 100 mentions and you respond to 70 of them - your response rate stands at 70%.
It is increasingly important to always aim to have a high response rate because customers expect businesses to be proactive these days. They like to be talked to directly and prefer getting their questions answered ASAP. As long as you maintain a high response rate, you will be able to establish a greater amount of trust among your customers, and you will be able to develop stronger relationships with them.
Social media marketing can be a challenging endeavor. There are many available platforms and ways to use them, along with lots of advice on the type of content that’s most effective. But it doesn't have to be complicated. When it comes to using social media for business, one simple saying really sums it all up: engaging content consistently.
Santhoshi is a content marketer turned product marketer. When she's not thinking about marketing, she's thinking about her 6-year-old daughter and what to make for dinner for the second night in a row (she's an avid vegetarian). She loves writing, Netflix, reading, and spending time with her sprightly 6-year-old. She loves her coffee strong!
