Vasudha VeerannaSocial media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been around for quite a few years now. Since their launch, they quickly grew to become the modern marketer’s preferred channels to reach out to and engage with their audience at scale. With several tactics that can be used in both paid and non-paid forms of social media marketing, they do hold great potential in helping a business establish itself as a brand. And yet, only a few businesses are able to use these channels effectively.
To understand the challenges that digital marketers face in harnessing the power of social media, we conducted a survey, asking this question:
What is your top social media management painpoint?
a. Researching, curating and creating content for social media pages
b. Maintaining consistent activity across multiple accounts
c. Time and resource optimization and management
d. Difficult to measure ROI of efforts
e. Engaging audience and responding to all interactions
f. Keeping up with the new tech developments
48% of the respondents said that their biggest challenge lies in measuring ROI on their social media marketing efforts. And 31% said they had difficulty in researching, creating and curating content for their social channels.
Based on a survey conducted by DrumUp in July 2015 ©DrumUp (http://drumup.io/)
Despite the wide array of analytics tools available, measuring ROI can be tricky. Sure, you can get a count of the number of likes or views on a post; measure the Click Through Rate (CTR) and even track some advanced metrics such as Time Spent On-page. But it’s still difficult to determine how many of your followers are buying your product or service. In the words of Jay Baer, for every smart business, “The end goal is action, not eyeballs”.
Delving deep into social media analytics will perhaps help address the problem to some extent. However, time, effort and know-how become limiting factors, particularly in the case of small businesses that don’t necessarily have social media management expertise.
Apart from understanding how social media impacts their bottomline, we also found that a common challenge businesses face is content management. To keep their audiences engaged businesses must continuously create, curate and share great content.
Select survey responses
“My biggest social media management pain point is trying to measure the ROI of our social efforts. Thanks to dark social, it’s difficult to measure the customer journey from social media to your website to ultimately making a purchase. While there are tools included in many channels to measure your clicks and impressions, the data is often not rich enough to determine true ROI. While there are always less tangible benefits to posting on social, like brand awareness, many times it’s difficult to measure the hard impact that it has on your sales numbers.”
Makenzi Woods
Marketing Manager at Stirista
“We find that for most of our clients their top social media management pain point is measuring ROI of efforts. Oftentimes there are different individuals in an organization managing different aspects of their social media based on their comfort level and experience. When there are silos in your social media management because not everyone understands the purpose of each network, what develops is that each aspect of your social media has a different goal and it becomes difficult to bring it all together. To determine ROI, you need to have one clear goal for all of your channels and focus on a few key reporting metrics each month, quarter and year.”
Christine Rochelle
Director of Digital Marketing and Operations at Lotus823
“No matter how organised and well managed our social media statistics are, we have great difficulty in measuring the direct impact of our efforts. Yes, we can see that we have an increase in followers/ likes/ engagement, but how does this translate to sales and enquiries? (which is the ultimate goal).”
Jennifer Ogden
Marketing Manager at Aspectit
“The content creation process for social media is the part of my job that takes the longest, but I wouldn’t call it a pain point. The biggest pain point for me is measuring the ROI for our social and content marketing. How do clicks relate to conversions? Is building the brand in the long term with content on social media really effective? What statistics should I be tracking, and which should I stop tracking? It’s a lot of work and sometimes the numbers seem to point in all different directions at once. Nailing down the most important metrics and optimizing our social media strategy in light of them is a big part of the marketing team’s job, but it’s worth it in the end.”
Dylan Kissane
Content Manager at DOZ
“I have good systems and tools to handle most of your options, but my biggest social media pain point most closely aligns with “d. Difficult to measure ROI of efforts” in that I haven’t found a good system for reporting. I want all my data in one place without having to enter data into spreadsheets. I’m currently testing out an analytics tool on a free trial and hope it meets my needs.”
Laura Nunemaker
Online Marketing Specialist at Social Media for Small Business
“Our chief frustration currently is finding a way to post unique, captivating content on over 50 pages. We have a Facebook and Twitter channel for each of our 50+ franchise locations. Our main, national Facebook page recently hit 1000 likes in approximately a six month period. While that line of Social Shares continues to increase by hundreds on a monthly basis, we are struggling to implement the same change in our local endeavors. A few attempts have included our content writers adding shareable blogs to the local sites, posting, linking, liking from the local channels, and boosting more posts on the local pages. In the end, we have found, much like anything else in this world, it only gets better as you spend more time on it.”
Scott Kennard
PR Specialist, SEO Strategist, and Social Media Campaign Developer at 911 Restoration
“My top social media management pain point would have to be maintaining a high level of content quality as part of your overall strategy. Sure, it’s great to get involved with new social sites in order to improve a brand’s presence, but if you fail to provide top-level, engaging, and interesting content to your following, your overall efforts will fall short of your goal. You can’t just haphazardly put together an article, post, or update for your social media channels just to satisfy your schedule. You need to put in the time to ensure that your content gives your audience information or advice that they can actionably put to use in their lives.”
David Bakke
Social Media Expert at Moneycrashers
“The social media posting/monitoring tools only get you half way. It takes forever to create the content but once you have it, you want it to automatically post to the desired channels at the desired time, but some services don’t cover the majors i.e. Facebook, twitter, instagram, pinterest, linked in, google+ so you can do 3/6 of what you have. “
Kelly Fallis
CEO at RemoteStylist
How to Manage the Top 2 Painpoints
Tips to measure ROI more effectively
- Before you decide on which metrics you should track, set your social media goals. For instance, do you want to simply increase awareness of your brand, or build an active community?
- Choose your platforms carefully. Not every social media platform suits every business. You should be where your audience is.
- Track your social media campaigns to review results and when necessary, re-align your strategy with your goals.
Tips to manage social content
- Find your golden ratio of content sharing. While some recommend the 5:3:2 rule for content sharing, others prefer the 30/60/10 mix. There’s also the 40/60 rule.
- Curate more than you create. It helps you save time and stay active on social media all at once.
- Use social automation to discover great content in less time.
With the amount of content being shared online, it’s easy for your updates to go unnoticed, or get lost in the noise on social media. While creating original content continues to be a challenge, content discovery tools help you manage both your time and your content more effectively, ensuring that you curate and share fresh, relevant and highly engaging content.
Tell us what your greatest social media management painpoint is in the comments section below.
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