One needs to step back and view the entire social-media landscape to identify the appropriate social channels to utilize for your strategy. Don’t spread your content too thin by utilizing numerous channels; rather, use the ones that your audience will be tuning into and better reflects your branded product, or service.
For example, Facebook content is more social in nature than LinkedIn, which the latter is business-to-business content-writing style. Instagram’s channel is visual and great for products images; minimal writing is required as a picture is worth a thousand words—as the adage goes. Twitter is limited to 140 characters; so, writing needs to be succinct in message delivery. Also, Instagram users are younger compared to Twitter users.
Once you’ve identified your social platforms, set up an editorial calendar to schedule and deliver your content on a consistent basis. This way, your audience will know when to expect your postings, and, hopefully, will be engaged in looking forward to reading them.
Specific channels have best times of delivery. You can use an automation program to schedule your posts—there’s no need to manually post your social media during specific times of the day. Hootsuite, Oracle Eloqua and Marketo are examples of marketing automation products that can schedule posts.
From experience—Caveat Emptor—the free version of Hootsuite is an aggregator that will provide its own link to Google Analytics; thus, lowering your social media website visit statistics. In this case, visits for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were significantly lower after previously reported highs. After abandoning the free version and deciding to manually post, the numbers started to climb again.
As an aside, marketing automation products will, foremost, provide you with a visitor profile once the individual has filled in a form on your website page. The visitor will be tracked throughout the process and tie in with your Customer Relationship Management tool, or some automation products come with its own CRM.
Contrary to known visitor profiles, Google Analytics will deliver visitors’ anonymous information, where one can acquire reports on numerous information; for example social media traffic, goals attained, device category sessions, and behaviours. Visit beginners guide to GA if you’re a novice. Also, a nice tool to use is StatCounter, where their reports provide ISP addresses of visitors and including their locations pinned on a world map. These reporting tools will provide a code that needs to be embedded in the website for analytics tracking.
As I previously posted, once you direct your social media post to your website, you need to determine a conversion factor. For instance, are you selling products online where you have ecommerce? If so, your conversion is for your visitors to make purchases. Or you may want your visitors to sign up for a newsletter, or download whitepaper; then you will add these acquired names to your CRM for future marketing opportunities. Whatever the choice, you need to set up your website’s landing page accordingly.
Hope this basic information allowed you to see a broader perspective of your social media.