When social media marketing started to become a popular source of income for the few businesses who were lucky enough to see the full potential of social networking, the playing field was definitely leveled in their favor. It was simply only a matter of creating a decent piece of content and submitting it to the masses. It was a pretty straight forward and easy process.
Today, keeping up with the social media world is not quite so simple. The game has changed and there are no longer only a couple of social media sites worth looking into. Now there are dozens of them and maintaining a presence on each one is a little complicated. There are a few tools out there to help with the process, but the overall simplicity has been lost in all the confusion.
Making social media make sense
Even though there are now dozens of social media platforms worth taking part in, the underlying elements that made social media marketing a success remain the same. There are four basic pieces to the social media pie. Knowing how to use these four pieces makes managing a social media campaign more simple and sensible.
Piece #1: Monitoring
Keeping a very close eye on how your social media posts cause people to interact is the first thing every company should be doing. It is easy to split test posts on variety of social media platforms and gauge how they perform. It is also easy to monitor your competition as well. You can gain some incredibly valuable insight with these two situations.
Piece #2: Managing
Creating a set schedule for deploying, monitoring and managing social media campaigns makes it easier to keep track of everything that is going on the social media world, but you must also be tweaking your campaign in order to get the best results. Changing your content according to performance is a good idea.
Piece #3: Measuring success and failure
How are you going to reach the top of the social media pile if you don’t know what works and what doesn’t work? You can’t. This is where measuring the effectiveness of your content makes a huge difference. Once you know what works best, you can simply wash and repeat it.
Piece #4: Show me the money
Your business is not taking part in the social media world because it is fun. Okay, it is a little fun to use social media for this purpose. However, the ultimate goal is always going to be increasing your income. Once you are able to determine which types of content lead directly to sales, the guessing game is over. Social media provides these types of opportunities daily, but it can be difficult to repeat. People’s buying habits differ greatly, but once some content goes viral it can be easy to understand how to further capitalise on it.
On your own, or with a trusted social media marketing expert, when you put all four pieces of the social media pie together and you have a recipe for social media success.