The journey towards a successful social media marketing campaign begins exactly the same as any marketing plan – defining your target audience and then setting specific objectives that can be measured. It is strongly recommended that you do not move forward without these two items clearly defined as they are essential to laying the groundwork for success.
Upon completion the next step is determining where your target audience is actively engaged, who the key influencers are and how does your target audience consume and share information. The best way to answer these questions is to implement a social media monitoring program. Depending on your budget and timeframe you can utilize either paid and/or free monitoring tools (below are two examples).
- Radian6 provides you a complete platform to listen, measure and engage with your customers across the internet. This is a paid tool; however, you can register for a demo on their corporate website.
- SocialMention is a free social media search and analysis tool that aggregates user generated content from across the web into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about your company and its products and competitors across over 100 social media properties.
The next step is building your social media strategy while leveraging the findings of your monitoring program. This strategy should include a mix of tactics that will provide support to the campaign. These social media tactics can include the following: blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, social media bookmarking, etc. The final component is installing proper measurement tools to track the success of your campaign. Below are some of the metrics that you can use for measurement:
- Followers/Connections
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Sales/Registrations
It is recommended to use these two free tools for tracking your campaigns:
- Google Analytics – use those on your landing pages to track site metrics such as traffic sources, time on site and sales funnel.
- Bit.ly – use this tool to create shortened URLs and track clicks.
Check out these common social media mistakes.
Author: Brian Rice
