Is Your Social Media Working?

Or are you just posting and wasting time?

Recently, Copyblogger killed its Facebook page, and Bob Bly wrote this interesting article in Target Marketing, “B-to-B Insights: Return to Sender”. It’s something to think about.

Are you just posting on social media because it’s there and you think you need to? Or, is it actually providing value to your business?

With this in mind, here are a few things to think about when it comes to your social media…

• Is your target-market using social media?

If you are a celebrity, politician, or big brand, social media may be essential to your success and bringing in new followers. But if your audience members consist of people who rarely go online, use brick-and-mortar businesses only, or simply don’t use social media, you are simply wasting time and effort!

• Are you testing your results?

Ok… so you want to try social-media, or you’ve been using Twitter^®, Facebook^®, LinkedIn^®, and more for several months, it’s essential to track results. Are people actually sharing your data, reading your posts, providing valuable feedback, and actually helping your brand move forward? These are stats you need to monitor and know on a weekly basis.

• Do you have a plan?

Are you just posting to post, or is there a marketing plan behind your efforts?

When people view your social-media, what do you want them to do? Sometimes, you are just posting insights or links to news and comments. Other times, you’ll want to provide a link to a unique, landing page with a single message and a big, call-to-action button. Then, you track those results and see if your social-media efforts actually lead directly to a sale. If not, make changes to the landing page and content, test the new version and see what happens.

Social Media is a Marketing Process.

Social media is about interacting with your target market and giving them valuable information they will want to share with others. It’s about building a brand, and ultimately, boosting sales. If you’re social media isn’t doing that, or you don’t know if it is or not, it’s time to make changes.

Creating a social-media campaign with the appropriate timing, landing pages, monitoring, testing, and follow-up is extremely time-consuming. And if you are in the right business, it can be essential to your success. But if you create and test social-media campaigns and don’t see the type of results you are looking for, it’s time to re-evaluate.

Perhaps, you need to focus your efforts on a single, social-media aspect such as a blog. Or, you may want to avoid social-media altogether and focus on other, marketing and public relations’ techniques to build sales.

Just because social media is popular, it doesn’t mean you need to use it. Instead, why not spend your valuable resources on the activities that really matter to your customers… and ultimately, your bottom line?

For help with your overall, BtoB content strategy, please see these articles.

And for more information, please contact me here.