1. Analyze your audience’s online activity

   Your consumers read your content at different times, depending on their jobs, time zones, and other influential factors. Hence, it’s important for you to use tools such as Google Analytics and Tweroid to determine when your readers are most likely online and interested in visiting your website. This will allow you to distribute content at optimal times. For instance, you can schedule tweets for 5am in the morning if a majority of your readers are from the East Coast and they’re more likely to consume digital content at 8am (their time) when they’re commuting to work.

2. Listen to conversations online

   In addition to monitoring your current audience’s digital activities, you should also listen to other online conversations and identify popular topics. You should use tools such as Sprout Social, Google Trends, and Radian6 to find certain topics that are current heating up. This will allow you to create content regarding popular topics to induce your consumers. This approach is crucial if you want to cut through the clutter by producing and sharing valuable, timely, and pertinent content. 

3. Identify which types of content attain the most traffic and retweets

   Inbound marketing is as goal-driven as other marketing approaches. Thus, you have to assign specific metrics to reflect your performance. The easiest ways to assess your social marketing performance is by looking at your web traffic and retweets. This will help you determine the popularity of particular content and the possibilities of why they’re well-received. This will help you further produce content that’s interesting to your audience as well as boost your inbound traffic and shareability.

4. Use various digital channels differently

   Various digital channels have different purposes. In our experience, platforms such as Twitter should be used to engage in content marketing, specifically textual content. Networks such as Facebook on the other hand should be image-oriented where brands publish 90% visual content and only 10% textual content. If you've visually-driven articles such as Recap of 2014 BCAMA Vision Conference, Facebook would be optimal channel to distribute them. By customizing your content for different networks, you can heighten your engagement with your community.

To determine whether you're using social media optimally, perform a P.A.C.E Digital Marketing Audit.