From Neil Patel:
By now you’re convinced your business needs social media. You've overcome of the common pitfalls, like who owns it, lack of participation and lack of personality. You’ve even gone through social media guides to help you get started…So things should be smooth sailing from here, right? I hate to break it to you, but you’re wrong.
There are two pitfalls that can make your social media efforts stumble… pitfalls that I’ve seen even advanced social media users fall into. Here’s how to avoid them.
Pitfall 1: Flying blind
When it comes to using social media, you don’t immediately think to measure what you do on Twitter or Facebook—it’s not as obvious as say measuring the visits to your website. Besides, it’s possible to measure the wrong things. If you think about it, the goal of social media is to connect with people in meaningful ways that build relationships that hopefully get people to brag about you and your company.
If that’s the case, why do we spend so much time measuring quantity rather than depth? In other words, mass reach might not be the best measurement.
So what should we be measuring?
- Social media leads – Where are the leads to your website coming from? Which social media site?
- Engagement duration – How long are people typically interacting with you on social networks? Whether it’s time spent on your Facebook fan page or watching a video, you need people thinking about you and your business, as that’s what helps build strong relationships.
- Bounce rate – Do the people coming to your site and leave quickly coming from social media? If so, which one?
- Activity ratio – How good are the members in your social networks? What percentage of them are interacting versus being inactive?
- Conversions – You aren’t succeeding at social media unless you are getting people from these social sites to convert into sales, subscriptions, leads or however you define conversion.
- Mentions – How many times are you, your brand or your product mentioned on the social Web? Social Mention is a simply tool you can use to track this.
- Loyalty – You need to measure the repeated interaction that you are having with users on social sites. Who are the most loyal users and how can you encourage more people to be loyal?
- Virality – Are you creating content that is getting shared and passed around the social Web? This is an important measurement since viral content doesn’t cost much money.
- Blog interaction – You need to measure how many comments you are getting, how your content is being shared, and then you need to figure out how you can encourage more sharing.
So how do you go about measuring these metrics?
This tool gives you metrics about your Facebook pages and the content you put on there. It’s designed to help you analyze trends like demographics, user growth, creation of content and how users are consuming that content. It’s a free service for anybody with a Facebook page, so there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t be using it.
This product has a great tag line, “egotracking for you.” It gives you all your online statistics in one place, giving you historical reports if you aren’t the type to check out your stats every day. Once you authenticate your accounts like Twitter and Facebook, it will start collecting data on you. They’ll send you an e-mail when data on your key performance indicators is ready.
I think this tool is invaluable for controlling how you look on the Internet. You can eliminate false links that show up in Google results and promote truthful pages. It’s not cheap, but I think worth the investment if staying on top of your reputation is important to you.
Pitfall 2: Data paralysis
If you are on the ball and tracking all of your social media data, the next pitfall you have to avoid is allowing all that information to confuse you and cause you not to make any decisions.
Measuring data is just not enough. You need to use that data to make changes to your business.
In June 2011, Web Liquid surveyed 237 senior U.S. marketers for the “Marketers & Social Media Monitoring Survey 2011” to see how they were using their social media metrics. Here were there results:
- 28% on communication strategies – From sending messages to tweaking the frequency of tweets or shortened the length of their Facebook posts.
- 19% for customer service enhancements – In other words, they were getting direct feedback from social media sources about their products.
- 15% for media planning – This allowed them to decide how they were going to talk to their customers and prospects, and how to slice up that pie over online and offline channels.
- 13% for organic search optimization – Social media can impact your SEO, and through it you can get more customers through search engines.
- 11% paid search optimization – This allowed them to look at their PPC efforts and how it impacted their social media content.
It takes years to develop a good eye for analyzing data and making good decisions off of it, but there are tactics that can help you get started. Let’s look at some of the metrics above, and I’ll give you an example of a business decision you might make based off of the data.
- Engagement decision – Think about how often you publish and how long your posts are. You might want to mix the topics and channels, like adding photos and videos and then see how people respond. If they respond more to videos, start adding more.
- Duration – If you have a low duration score you may want to try longer posts with more subheadings. Also, put some links into the posts to get people to click through to your website. Or if it’s a video, you may want to try and make the opening of your videos more enticing.
- Activity rate – If you don’t have high activity on Facebook, for instance, you may need to re-think who you invite to join your fan page. You may be attracting the wrong fans. Or you may need to ask more questions in your posts and even spend time responding to comments.
- Conversion – If your conversions are down, then it’s probably time to hire a good conversion rate expert who can look at your landing pages or subscribe boxes and write better copy.
- Mention – If you or your brand is not getting a lot of mentions on the social web, perhaps you should try a few PR stunts.
- Loyalty – If loyalty is low in your social circles, you probably aren’t sharing enough interesting content. Is it all about you and your products? Or are you trying to help your customer? Make sure you focus on your customers and not yourself.
- Virality – Study what has made certain videos go viral and try to copy their tactics. All you have to do is browse social sites and preform a few searches for topics related to your industry and you’ll be able to see what’s hot and what’s not.
Making decisions based on social media metrics is less of a science and more of an art, but the more time you stare at the data and spend trying to make decisions, the better you will get at it.
Conclusion
Leveraging social media to make your business grow will only work if you measure the success of your efforts, make decisions based on that information and then implement those changes.
What other advanced social media pitfalls have you seen people fall into?
Source: http://www.openforum.com/articles/are-you-ignoring-these-2-social-media-marketing-pitfalls
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