Dwight is absolutely right. You can actually track your social media for ROI, it just requires a little prep work. So how can you set up your social media to be measured?
First, it’s important to know which business functions can be enhanced with social media. These areas include sales, customer service, HR, PR and feedback (business intelligence).
- Sales: If you already have promotions set up for each quarter, you can translate those strategies into social media and even create specific audience targets to engage with your brand.
- Customer Service: You can train your staff how to respond to inquiries, complaints or reviews on social media to create stronger relationships with customers or clients.
- HR: Have a bunch of tech-savvy recent grads? Help them adjust to their new positions by inviting them to participate in the private company Facebook group. This will help HR staff maintain confidential conversations through messenger and provide updates on upcoming internal events or business development opportunities.
- PR: Thanks to social media, you can now promote that press release to a larger audience, track who clicked on your press release, who is engaged and respond to questions quickly.
- Feedback: One of the gifts of social media is being able to collect feedback from large groups without conducting formal focus groups. Need to know how people feel about the latest product? Ask them directly. This is particularly beneficial when your executive team and board members are making plans for the future.
Second, understand your purpose, methodologies, and the tools you’ll need for your social media. Before you jump in, it’s important to understand the purpose of your messages and how they tie into current business goals. What are you trying to achieve? Who should engage with your message? What results do you want to see? How will you track these results? These are the questions you should be asking your team in order to decide what numbers you’ll be tracking. Yes, REAL numbers. For example, if you’re trying to acquire new customers, you might have a promoted post with a link to a specific landing page to collect their information. You’ll want to measure clicks on that post as well as visitors to the page. This will require both social media data and Google data. Then, you’ll need a way to present this data to your team, Do do this, you’ll need to research which software can pull in both sets of data to create digestible reports (yes, you need to do all of this before you even log in to your social media accounts).
Third, draft out strategies and tactics. Once you and your team have agreed on the purpose of your social media’s it’s time to break it down. How are you going to reach your target audience? Which platforms do they use? This will require some research. If you’re targeting Millennials, you know that most of them still use Facebook but if you’re targeting Gen Z, you’ll have to consider Instagram and Snapchat. Then, you’ll need to go back to tools and methodologies to decide what type of results you want to see. Once you’re set on strategies, it’s time to figure out tactics. This is where a content calendar comes into play. You can brainstorm what type of content to publish, when to publish it and where to publish it.
As a result of your hard work, you can create a fun and engaging social media program that will make everyone involved with the process happy, especially that CEO who thought social media was for those “youngin’s”.