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Knowing when and where to post social media content is as important as knowing what to post.[/caption]
Putting together daily social media posts and weekly blogs can seem like a futile task if you don’t know how effective they are. Creating or scheduling the content is only half of the business battle—to use social media effectively, you have to know how well it’s working.
Tracking your social media activity will also help you attract a larger, more engaged audience and allow you to communicate more effectively with your customers. Here are a few tips:
Timing is everything
If you’re not communicating effectively, maybe you’re not reaching your audience when they’re online. Many social media feeds—Twitter in particular—are so clogged up that your window to catch your customers is narrow. Social marketing has burgeoned from a “you should be doing this” to a “blink and you’ll miss it” avenue for reaching customers.
A relatively new site, SumAll, will help you track at which time of day you get the most engagement as well as which types of posts work best for you. Once you have those two vital pieces of information, it’s just a matter of putting them together.
Hash it out
If you have a Twitter account for your business (or you use your personal account to share business information), check out TweetReach. It’s a free tool that will track the reach of a specific keyword or hashtag. Try #oilchange or #automaintence or #WinterReady; with TweetReach, you can determine how far your hashtag has traveled. You’ll also see the most influential accounts that help spread your message—and getting friendly with them is a great way to further expand your reach. When they retweet or share you content, a simple ‘thank you!’ will go a long way.
Look around
If you have a suspicion that your competitor is doing better with their social media marketing than you are, you may be right. A quick way to find out is to use RivalIQ. RivalIQ will help you understand what your competitors are doing on various social media channels—what works for them, what doesn’t, and where they don’t have a presence.
Go with the flow
With a customized website landing page, you can easily see many social media metrics—particularly where your website traffic is coming from. If you have separate landing pages from Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat or Shopify, you can determine which gets more traffic and then concentrate your social media marketing there. It doesn’t make sense to spend all your time creating Twitter messages when half your traffic is funneled in through Facebook.
Use your clout
Klout is a great tool because it measures your social media influence by looking at how your posts drive the actions of your audience. Used with your Facebook page, for example, it will examine either your business page or personal profile and create a score based on several factors, including how many friends and followers you have. Klout claims to process 12 billion social media posts daily from 620 million users, so there’s a lot of information at your fingertips.
Those are a few ways to hone your social media presence. Do you know of any others? Let us know in the comments.