4 High-Value Activities in Social Media Marketing

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| 21 Jan 2014 |

According to VentureBeat, 15 million businesses and organizations now have a Facebook page. That said, though social media can allow businesses to have an enormous reach of consumers, it only creates the greatest impact when marketers use it soundly. Here are top 4 high-value activities in social media marketing:

Share timely and relevant content

Social media doesn’t work in silos. It’s simply a channel that enables brands to showcase their products or service, their new releases, and other marketing materials. Hence, it’s important for businesses to continuously create articles, YouTube video, and infographics that are that pertinent to their audiences to deepen their relationships. At Smartt, a majority of our reader is marketers, business owners, and other business professionals who are interested in digital media. To cater to this group, we focus our content primarily on technology news, marketing insights, and how-to articles that are relevant to our audience. This enables us to improve our readership and shareability. You can also adopt this approach by examining who your audience is and share timely and relevant content based on their interests.
Assess performance based on solidified metrics

Just like your other business metrics such as return on investment (ROI) and profit margin, social media metrics are vital to your business. By setting benchmarks and examining your performance based on metrics such as the number of weekly retweets, the growth of Twitter followership (in %), and the number of weekly responses, you can determine if you’re improving your social engagement. Moreover, you can identify if you’re growing at an optimal rate. For instance, if you realize that your Twitter followership increases by merely 0.1% week-over-week instead 2% (your objective), you can modify your social media strategy to boost your performance. You can use a social media monitoring tool to track your performance.
Conduct a conversation audit

A conversation audit assesses the different conversations that occur online. This approach is particularly useful on Twitter as you can easily find Twitter conversations through Twitter Search. Companies such as Dell actively find conversations online related to their brand to examine if the topics are positive or negative about the brand. Generally in a conversion audit, you would consider the following 4 elements:
- Current share of voice: This is the percentage of conversations online about your brand versus your competitors. For example, if 9 conversations are about your competing brands and only 1 conversation is about you, your current share of voice is 10%.
- Share of conversation: This is the percentage of conversations about your brand versus your entire industry. For instance, if you’re a sports apparel retailer and 1 out of 20 online conversations regarding the sports apparel industry is about your brand, your share of conversation is 5%.
- Key conversation themes: This component assesses a conversation’s context when your brand, competitors, or industry is mentioned. This enables you to determine if your audience is passionate or dissatisfied about your products. This helps you find opportunities to interact with your prospects or existing clients and improve your brand image.
- Keywords that are used online: This section identifies what words your consumers use when they talk about your brand, competitors, or industry. This can help you improve your search ranking and content creation as you’ll be able to produce content that’s more suitable and relevant to your audience. Additionally, you’ll enhance your bond with your readers as you’ll speak their lingo.
Conduct an online sentiment analysis

An online sentiment analysis can determine if the overall conversation regarding your brand is positive, negative, or neutral. To conduct a sentiment analysis, you can use a 5-point scale where 1 is negative, 2 is slightly negative, 3 is neutral, 4 is slightly positive, and 5 is positive. You can use this approach to analyze your collective online presence, which include blogs, news, and social media. You can also use it only for specific social networks. For instance, you can conduct an online sentiment analysis only for the Twittersphere or Facebook and see how consumers perceive you on different platforms. This will enable you to determine your brand position and reputation and identify areas where you can improve.

Social media is the radio, television commercial, and newspaper ad of the digital world. It’s how today’s companies reach their target audience, showcase their new products, and build up their brand exposure and image. In order to effectively leverage social media, companies have to create valuable content, measure their performance, and conduct various analysis to determine their social initiatives. This helps businesses improve their marketing results and identify opportunities where they can further engage with their audiences.

To see how you can improve your social channels and improve your brand image, please check out our social media and digital marketing audits or contact us to book a complimentary meeting.

4 High-Value Activities in Social Media Marketing

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4 High-Value Activities in Social Media Marketing

Share timely and relevant content

Assess performance based on solidified metrics

Conduct a conversation audit

Conduct an online sentiment analysis

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