Strategies For An Effective Social Media Campaign

Social media is fast becoming the primary means of reaching an audience – young people don’t even read newspapers anymore; if they want the news they’ll see what’s trending on their favourite social network.

It’s no surprise, then, that one of the most effective means of marketing in 2016 is through the utilisation of these social media channels.

That said, social media is a different format to what’s come before it, and to use it successfully in marketing you need to have a focus and a means of measurement. Your social media campaign can only be meaningfully managed by using tech tools to help you sort and understand vast quantities of uncategorised data.

Find the Right Platform and Analyse the Traffic

To begin with, not all social media are created equal. LinkedIn, as a professional networking site, is best used for looking for new team members or finding new business opportunities. Twitter is best for quick up-to-update messages that you can get away with sending as often as 10 times (or more if you’ve got an audience in the tens or hundreds of thousands) an hour, while Facebook is more static and billboard-like. Your marketing team should understand these different platforms and their users before you begin a campaign.

You have to develop a strategy to manage and understand the haphazard complexity of social media, so using big data analytics is a must. You can use technology tools to analyse how your customers use social media, such as how much traffic was generated by a particular post, and on which media platform. You may even discover markets you didn’t know existed, since use of your product was traditionally targeted to only certain key demographics. Without software to sort all this out for you, you will only have a jumble of data your team cannot interpret and use effectively.

Become a Part of the Community

Secondly, social media is a community, so you have to be aware of what happens when you walk into the middle of a group conversation. You can’t control where the conversation goes, and you may commit social faux pas if you aren’t sure your message is in the right forum. Again, using technology that can allow you to listen to your audience can help you design the right campaign. You can amass data based on keywords that will let you know who is talking about your brand or product, what is being said, and who is leading the conversation. Tech tools can uncover correlations between your product and certain key words or topics, which you can use to create new ad content. If your product lends itself to direct conversation, you can then use it to create discussions.

When all’s said and done, to be successful on social media, you have to understand the community in which you wish your brand to be a member, and then you have to learn how to become a part of that community. Once you have accomplished this, you will be able to deliver your message and be heard.

Continue reading here: How to Grow Your Website Traffic with Infographics

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