As we look forward to 2014 it's a good time to think about how you've spent your time on social media. Which sites really had a good return on your investment in time and energy? Which ones had the best engagement with your fans and followers? Which ones turned out to be less worthy of your time? Here are some ways to evaluate your social strategy and streamline to make 2014 more productive and engaging for you and your social business.
Take a look at your social media accounts
- View each of your profiles from a user's perspective. Is your messaging on track? Check which words and tags you use most with apps like TweetCloud or Tagxedo (websites, blogs, Twitter). You may be surprised at which words you're using the most. Are you sending the message you think you are?
- Use metrics tools like Social Bro, Sumall and Social Bakers to analyze your pages and profiles.
- Are you missing opportunities to engage users by not asking and answering questions about your products?
- Which posts got you the best engagement? Do more of that.
- Which posts fell flat even though you thought they were brilliant? Maybe the timing was wrong, or maybe you missed the mark. Fine tune and try again if you think it is an important point.
- Check your timing with Crowdbooster. Just because 6 AM is your favorite time to post, it may not be the time your network is most responsive.
- Clean out the spammers and the deadwood with a Twitter Audit. Get rid of your fake followers and spammers. Take a look at the users who are "inactive" and see if they need some help or they're more active on other networks. Go there.
Get organized
Think about an editorial calendar. If you're not sure what that looks like, check out this one from LightBox Collaborative. An ed cal can significantly improve the way you look at developing content as well as making it easy for the entire team to see what your goals and plans are for 2014.
Plan to explore more
There are so many social networks and so little time. Kill the ones you aren't using and do some searches on sites like SocialMention to see if there are conversations important to you going on in new networks. Evaluate the network, see if others you want to talk to are there, and decide if it's a good fit for you!