With devices such as the iPhone and iPad taking homes, offices and almost all places by storm, browsing the web and connecting to sites like Facebook, Google+, Twitter is such an easy thing – making social media the newest and hottest technique for marketing.
Most businesses today have invested their marketing efforts into pushing their way into social media because that’s where people are. It makes a lot of sense but does it work and is social media an effective marketing tool?
Many businesses are not reporting a lift in sales from social media but it is widely acknowledged that there are a range of benefits from creating a stronger dialogue with the market.
So how do we measure these secondary benefits?
According to an infographic initially created by Pagemodo – Facebook’s marketing company, their initial research led them to conclude that the ROI of social media as a marketing tool was not measurable in monetary terms.
Instead, the kind of ROI that companies got from using social media for marketing was measured by the impact it creates.
But today, the Pagemodo study says that it looks like companies using this technique can now get an ROI both in monetary and impact terms.
Aside from these benefits, a Chief Marketer survey has also noted that marketers who used social media as a tool incurred the following increases:
- +60% numbers linking as friends, followers, likes
- +30% visits or time spent with brand social content
- +39% sharing, forwarding, retweeting, posting brand content
- +25% incremental sales attributable to social media
- +35% qualified leads from social media
- +18% brand awareness/favorability
With these statistics, you should be able to get a strong picture if the impact of social media on your business. But the tricky part here is how to get your social media audience engaged, how to grow their numbers and convince them to act on that engagement or interest.
With that said, here are some tips on effective social media marketing:
- Find a platform that is used by your target market and focus on it. Don’t try and be “all things to all people.”
- Be active – log in to your social profiles every day.
- Be discerning with your connections and try to build a network that reflects your business, target market and personal values.
- Interact with your followers – respond to direct messages and any effort made by people who are interested in engaging with your business, good or bad.
- Post content that encourages conversation – post meaningful and interesting status updates about your business, encourage your social media audience to interact with your business.
- Build market traction – gain new followers, grow your audience.
- Put some simple measures in place to track progress on a number of fronts
With all of the benefits pointed out here, it is good to know that social media is truly an effective marketing tool businesses.
So have you started a social media campaign for your business yet? If not, I encourage you to do so but make sure you are measuring the impacts to determine where you need to focus next.
What are you measuring and why?
Russell
