Sometimes the best way to see if your business needs help with social media is to get your hands dirty and do social media self-evaluation. You might not (yet) be a social media expert, but going through these five steps can definitely help you both understand and optimize the growth of your online presence AND your business.
The Five Step Social Media Evaluation
Ask yourself these 5 questions and start getting insight on where your strengths and areas or improvement on social lie:
1. What social media channels is your business already on?
Every business, even B2B ones, should have a profile on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These are the most widely used social networks in the world, and having a presence on these channels is necessary for your business's reputation and credibility.
There are a number of other social media networks like Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, etc. that could be beneficial for your business, too, however only start up profiles on these if you're confident you can handle the upkeep. Doing 2-3 social networks really well is much better than 5-6 in a mediocre fashion.
Interested in strengthening your SEO? I'd recommend creating a Google+ account. It's not integral that you consistently post on Google+, but simply having one will really give your searchability a boost
Check In: How many social channels are you using? How would you rank your use of them (poor, mediocre, great)? Are you ready to scale up or should you scale down?
2. How often is your business is posting?
Here at Likeable Local, we find that the ideal balance between being active and being SO active that it's annoying is:
- 5-6 posts a week on Facebook
- 12 tweets a day
- 5 LinkedIn posts a week.
Concerned that you're not hitting the right numbers? Check out our 10 Commandments of Content Creation to learn about the perfect content ratio.
Check In: Write down how often you are posting on each network you're using for your business. Is it too much? Too little? Do you have the time and resources to dedicate to getting optimizing post frequency? (if not think about hiring a company or using a tool like Likeable Hub to help)
3. What's the quality of your posts?
- First things first, let's look at the text. If you constantly find yourself going over about 140 characters (or three lines of text) on Facebook, you need to start thinking smaller. Don't forget, social media is for short attention spans. Expand on your thoughts in full-length blog posts if you have something more to say.
- Don't forget to spellcheck and use proper grammar. Nothing screams unprofessional like misspellings.
- Check out how you are utilizing hashtags. Hashtags thrive on Twitter and Instagram, but too many can be a bad thing. Play it safe by posting one or two at the end of the sentence that are relevant to your post.
- Your social media accounts shouldn't exist in a vacuum - are you posting engaging links? A great way to show how much of an expert you are in your field is to curate content from your favorite sources.
- Are you posting pictures? Are they high quality? Social media is a visual world where text posts and low res pictures get ignored. Even more visually appealing are videos - be sure to post relevant and fun ones
- The final way to ensure you're producing the best quality posts is to include calls to action. Creating a social media community is important, but you want to push that community to actively grow your business.
Check In: Examine 10 of your recent posts. Is the text short & sweet? Is spelling & grammar correct? Have you incorporated links to articles and multimedia like photos & videos?
4. How much engagement are you getting?
- Great content should result in likes, favorites, shares, retweets, comment, replies and any other way that fans can show their love. If you're following the above advice and not seeing any engagement, you're likely missing a crucial component for success on social (especially Facebook): advertising. In order to succeed in social media you must embrace the fact that it is increasingly pay-to-play. Not sure what that is? Check out this blog post on Facebook's algorithm change and what the decline in organic reach means for you.
- By "boosting," or advertising, posts you're able to reach more people who matter to your business with your posts. Cheers to that.
- Once the engagement starts rolling in, make sure you nurture those conversations. Be sure to answer questions, thank great reviews, and overall, have fun with social. Your active community will start turning into referrals with your stellar social presence
Check In: Look at your post reach on Facebook and see how many fans you're reaching. Is that number super low? How much engagement are you getting on a per-post basis? If you're not boosting posts, consider boosting your next Facebook Update. Check past comments & interactions on your page. Did you engage back?
5. How are you tracking ROI from social media?
- It's no fun to work at something and feel like you're not getting a return on your investment. To make sure you're seeing ROI, implement a tracking system based on what your goals are. Look at who's clicking through or engaging with posts
- Also, use tracking URLs to know when folks from social turn into a business lead by filling out a form on your website from a link you posted on Facebook, for example.
- This will help you find a correlation between how much you're spending on social and the revenue social is bringing in.
- This is key to learning how well social media is working compared to your other marketing efforts. Knowing your results can help you create goals and what campaigns or strategies are working the best.
Check In: Do you have any ways of measuring your social media endeavors effectiveness? Have you established what your #1 goal is on social? Define these things before investing too much, so you can understand the results.
There are always ways your business can grow on social so take a step back every few months to look at the bigger picture. If your presence isn't on par, that's ok. Start off small by improving upon one aspect, tracking a new metric, or creating a social initiative with the goal to create that return on investment. In the end, it's all about incremental adjustments to make your social the best it can be.
Rome wasn't built in a day... your social presence won't be either.
This post was written by Shannon Rompala, Likeable Local's Partnership Development Specialist. Likeable Local provides intelligent social media software solutions to help small businesses build, engage, and grow with social media using our intelligent social media. The Likeable Hub software helps businesses save time on social, generate leads and referrals, manage their reputation, increase their online reach, and consistently post engaging content on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. More information at LikeableLocal.com.