Social media is a great tool to help enhance a company’s brand visibility, awareness, and recognition, but it is dynamic and often hard to keep up with the latest trends. Here are some tips to navigate this ever-changing outlet and help you stay up to date on top trends.
Choosing the Right Platform
In order to enhance your company’s brand visibility, awareness or recognition, you must first identify the platform(s) that best fit your company. When selecting the platform(s) you want to utilize, keep your audience in mind and note that it is better to focus 100% of your efforts on one or two platforms than two or more at 25%. It is imperative to keep the audience at the forefront of the company’s mind, creating engaging content and increasing brand visibility and awareness.
After selecting your platform(s) and identifying your target audience, it is time to decide how frequently to post content. It is important to remember that more input equals more output, and less input equals less output. However, you do not want to bombard your audience with too many messages. This also applies to engagement. If you want your audience to interact with you, you first have to engage with them. Before posting, it is critical to make sure that the content you are posting is relevant to your audience.
Social Listening is Critical
In order to stay updated on social media trends, social listening should be implemented to better engage with your audience and curate content that is most relevant to them. Social listening platforms such as Sprout Social and Sprinklr are tools that allow you to track trends and search keywords, helping you to stay updated on your audience’s interests. However, the best way to gauge your audience’s interest is to ask them directly. Polls and surveys are great tools to interact with your audience and find out why they’re interested in directly from the source. Implement these tactics regularly to keep your audience engaged and interested in your content.
Choosing and Tracking KPIs
In order to have a successful social media strategy, you must choose and track your KPIs. What are KPIs? KPIs (key performance indicators) are the metrics that your company measures that reflect overall performance. These metrics improve ROI, give you real time data, more money and help you connect with your audience. It is important to note that KPIs and metrics are interlinked, but different. Not every metric is a KPI, but every KPI is a metric. Be sure to align your KPIs with your strategic business goals, as it will help define goals and how social media fits.
When choosing your KPIs, it is critical to engage key stakeholders. Be sure to discuss and identify their priorities, ensure executive buy-in and integrate their ideas into your social media strategy. Next, conduct a social media audit to evaluate current social media performance through a SWOT analysis. By evaluating your current social media performance, you will be able to understand target audiences, discover new growth opportunities, uncover what is working and what is not, and review existing data to understand the past. Be sure to define your social media goals and objectives by using the SMART goal-setting framework and outline tactics that will support them.
A set framework is a requirement when it comes to choosing and tracking your KPIs, as it helps to monitor results over time and in real-time. This allows you to compare results within specific time periods and analyze what works and does not work. It is critical to report on trends and track your process as you go in order to analyze it. Be sure to keep report insights limited to KPIs, build a robust dashboard, analyze data and provide trends and highlight what is working and what is not. Platforms such as Socialbakers, Hootsuite, Buffer, Talkwalker and Knoros allow you to monitor your social data and provide trends to help you better connect with your audience.
Best Practices for Using Social in Your B2B Marketing
When implementing B2B marketing on social, brand advocacy is key in making it successful. Encouraging stakeholders to participate and engage on social media is key to enhancing your brand’s visibility, awareness and recognition. The audience, budget, and goal are also critical in the social media strategy implementation and should always be at the forefront of your mind.
When it comes to content, not everything has to be original. It is okay to repurpose company content and press coverage. Be sure to tag the journalist or media reporter to increase visibility and awareness. Continued engagement with your audience helps build momentum over time. However, in order to implement B2B marketing on social successfully, you must first understand the goals and objectives before defining your KPIs.
How to Have an Effective Social Media Report
Lack luster social media reporting not only affects the budget, but it can also affect the company goals and its career. A great social media report has the following: organizational support, ROI, strategy, and authority. Before creating your report, consider the TCS approach. TCS stands for transparency, context, and simplicity. Be sure to include the following five elements of an effective report: social media KPIs, learnings and insights, MOM metrics benchmarks, as well as a glossary of metrics.
If you choose to use a platform to monitor your social media analytics, make sure to check on the platforms themselves. Checking your analytics natively is just as important as utilizing platforms, as it provides reassurance that your data is correct. Be sure to memorize your strategy, KPIs and metrics calculations when creating your social media report.
This is not a one-and-done guide to successfully enhancing your company’s brand visibility, awareness, and recognition; however, it serves as a framework for your company to be successful on social. Be sure to conduct your own research in order to stay updated on all things social in order to provide your audience with the best content.
By Alyse-Noel Hicks