By Anton Koekemoer 10 OCT 2014
It is really common knowledge these days that your business needs a solid social media presence as part of your digital marketing strategy. Not only because your competitors are active on the social web but that your audience expects it. Social media isn’t new, yet many are still getting the basics wrong. Only having profiles on the top social media channels doesn’t mean you have a strategy in place. It means you don’t know how to take advantage of this medium to help you reach your business goals and supplement your current marketing campaign.
The name of “social media” says it all. It’s a social medium, but that doesn’t help if you are just socialising with your target audience and you cannot show any ROI for your efforts. It is vital that you know and understand the extent to which your campaign is actually influencing people. If your efforts are not showing the results you wish to achieve, then your strategy is simply not working. How can you monitor and check if you are having an effect online at all?
Check your reach
There’s a couple of social media influence analysis tools available such as Klout that can give you an overall score based on your social activity. Most of these tools provide you with statistics on the “range” of your online activity.
The nice thing about these social media authority tools are that they give you the topics that you are the most influential on. It also tells you which people you are influencing the most, and day by day visual charts detailing the growth of your online presence over the past few days. These tools can also give you predictions of how many followers you could potentially reach if your online presence activity remains the same.
The statistics provided by these tools can give you a good idea if you are heading in the right direction, but they shouldn’t be used to check if your campaign is a success or not. It only provides you with information on how to increase your score.
There’s an awesome Klout Google Chrome plugin that I use when I’m searching for people to connect with on Twitter. When doing a search on Twitter, it shows the Klout score next to the user’s profile. This is a quick way of checking who’s influential that you can connect with.
Are you getting through to your network?
When you are checking your results on these social media analysis tools you might be a little bit shocked to see how you are really getting through to people. A brand could have 10 000 followers on Twitter, which really seems very good, but if they are only engaging with 100 of them on a regular basis then they are barely reaching 1% of their potential prospects through that channel.
As far as digital marketing is concerned, building mutually beneficial social media relationships and getting through to your targeted audience is important in creating a loyal following to your network. The growing number of tools that provides you with your online activity reach have made it easy for brands and individuals to see where they can improve their digital marketing efforts with very little professional help.
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