Rethinking Your Social Media Marketing

Rethinking Your Social Media Marketing

Reviewing your social media marketing process on a regular basis is smart business. Social networks are continuously making modifications or adding new features and functionality to their platforms. These changes can directly affect the social media marketing tactics and techniques you use to promote your company and achieve your business goals.

Here are some areas to examine and tactics to explore to review and refresh your social media marketing efforts.

Review your metrics.

While social media marketing should not be all about numbers, knowing which numbers matter to your business can help you better measure the success of your efforts and campaigns. Engagement remains the key to gaining traction with your social media posts. While post likes are nice to have, comments are stronger forms of engagement. Even more important are shares.

While most social networks appear to restrict the visibility of your posts unless you pay to advertise, shares can help put your posts in front of more people with the added bonus of an implied endorsement from the sharer. More than most other metrics, focus on monitoring and influencing conversions such as clicks on links in your posts that lead to actions.

Lead with best network.

While you may be posting to several social networks, determine which one is the most fruitful. Which one gets you the most engagement? More importantly, which one actually converts from likes and comments to shares and transactions? Lead with the network that reaches the right audience for you - both the right target and the most responsive. Create content for that network first. That means make images and videos in the specific dimensions and compose content in the ideal length specifically for that network.

You can then tweak the creative assets you’ve produced to accommodate the other social networks you use. For example, if LinkedIn has generated the most leads for you, create images in the 1080x1080 format so they appear properly on LinkedIn. This same format can also be used on Facebook. If you also post to Instagram, use a tool such as Canva to take your original images and resize them to the 1080x1350 preferred size for Instagram. By putting more attention toward the social network that brings you the most business, you are streamlining the effort you put into preparing posts.

Explore AI integrations.

If you’re using social networks and online tools for marketing and sales, it is impossible to avoid artificial intelligence. AI functionality is adding new functionality as well as presenting some challenges to how you’ve been engaging in social media marketing. Get familiar with the AI features on the tools you currently use and take a look at some of the new AI-powered apps that have launched. AI tools can assist with everything from composing content to graphic design to image and video creation and editing. AI can also power "bots" that respond to online queries to provide more rapid responses to supplement customer service.

While all of the ways AI can support your social media marketing efforts may sound promising or helpful, be careful not to overly rely on AI to do all the work. Check the outputs to make sure they are not only accurate but reflective of your brand’s personality and tone. AI should not replace human input but be used to supplement it.

Build your community.

While posting to social networks on a frequent basis seems to be a common approach to social media marketing, cultivating a community can exponentially increase the effectiveness of your outreach. Members and Subscribers are more likely to engage with you than Followers. How can you turn your Followers into Members and Subscribers? Consider setting up a Facebook or LinkedIn Group or a community-based newsletter platform such as Substack.

While maintaining an online community can be time-intensive, the engagement and payoff can be much greater than multiple posts on regular social network feeds. Inviting customers and prospects into a "private" or "exclusive" online community gives them the opportunity to opt in and increases the likelihood that they will pay attention and welcome your posts.

Refresh your goals.

Take a look at your current goals for social media marketing. Have you been gaining on them or reaching them? Are they still relevant to your business? Given the constantly changing aspect of social networks and social media apps and tools, your goals may be outdated or no longer supported by the platforms or technology. Revisit your goals and make sure the new tactics and techniques you are applying to your social media marketing process are supported by the tools you’re using and the way you’re using them.