Social media is now firmly part of mainstream marketing strategy that all companies must adopt to accelerate its business. We are exploring what and how to implement.
Step 1. Set Goal(s)
Firstly, you need to clarify your social media campaign’s goal(s), be it increasing traffic to your website, attaining a target number of new subscriptions, boosting product sign-ups, attaining a certain number of social media followers or getting more people to attend your webinar. Ensure your goal is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound). For example:
Non-profit company
Business goal: increase donation by 12% in 6 months
Social media goal: increase social media traffic to website by 10% each month
Social media KPI: number of unique website visitors directed from Twitter, Google+, and Facebook
Step 2. AS-IS (where are we?)
It is important to understand the current performance of your metrics to allow you to objectively measure the benefits of your social media strategy. Take stock of the current status, for example, current website traffic volume (from Google analytics) or current customer sign-up rates (from your website).
Step 3. Plan (how do we achieve the goal?)
Define your brand personality, understand how you want to portray your business, in which industry sector, country, age group, tone of voice (e.g. fun or formal). This needs to be consistent across your various marketing strategies (i.e. social and non-social media). Before you undertake a certain strategy, take time to establish baselines, targets and benchmarks so you can clearly articulate your progress and achievements at each reporting interval.
Define schedule
Ensure you plan a schedule of all activities to be undertaken in your social media campaign. The plan needs to take into consideration events and holidays. For example, content and material should relate to the holiday event to increase its relevance and attractiveness.
Define reporting process
Define the frequency or point in time where the progress needs to be measure against the set out goal.
Define template
Ensure templates are set out to standardise the process and increase efficiency. For example, newsletters template, advertisement template etc.
Lastly, don’t forget to include in your plan the human interactive touch rather than just a robot on the internet.
Step 4. Measure & Analyse
Ensure the implemented social media strategy is quantitatively and qualitatively tracked and measure to understand the benefits.
Quantitative measures
Tracking Growth
Setting a follow growth is a clear simple way to measure the success. For example, to increase twitter follower from 2000 to 3000 in 2 months.
Engagement rate
Engagement rate is how your customers on social media interact with you. For example; how many people sign up to the webinar; how many times your content is re-posted; how many comments do you receive; how many times your blog has been mentioned in other blogs.
Conversion rate
Understand which social media growth results in the business benefits. For example, 1000 more twitter followers, is it resulted into the donation that you were looking for? If not, the actual campaign needs to be re-evaluated.
Qualitative measures
Analyse Comments/Feedback
Collecting the insight of the post of the campaign to understand the benefits, whether to be negative comments/feedback. This may need to be analysed campaign by campaign basis (or post by post)
Step 5. Revise and Improve Strategy
Fine tune the social media strategy, focus more on the social media that provides the business more benefits. Further develop the post / campaign that generate the positive feedback.
Nalinee Chinowuthichai is the co-founder of InvoiceInterchange, Singapore’s invoice trading platform, where SMEs can flexibly manage their cash flow by selling invoices to a network of investors who compete to provide cash advances.
