It’s important to know where you are in order to know where you’re going, wouldn’t you agree? The same goes for social media. In order to make any kind of progress, it’s vital to know where your strengths and weaknesses lie in order to make the necessary pivots and plans to achieve desired results. First, do you know what results you’re looking for? This is step one to social media success even before you create your very first piece of content.
These results are almost always in the form of dollars. How can I leverage social media to bring me more money and a high return on my investment?
If you’re measuring your performance around a key performance indicator (KPI), for example, you want to see 150 people download your most recent checklist from your latest social media post. Great! But a few things need to happen. You need to audit to see if that’s even something your existing audience wants and/or needs
Audience
For example, let’s say you’re a buyer’s real estate agent in Atlanta, Georgia and you post on your Facebook that there’s an open house for a home that’s priced at $1.5 million dollars — it’s a stunning home and you know it will make your buyers swoon, however is it realistic for the audience you have already on your channels? Do they have that kind of money? They might. Are you talking to the woman or man of the household? Depending on the audience you might tweak your caption accordingly.
Knowing your audience is key to understand how to then base your content around it so that you get the most engagement and ultimately ROI possible. Especially if you decide to pay to play and boost posts or even run offer ads.
Tweet: Knowing your audience is key to understanding what content to create.
Top Type
On social media there are a variety of ways to share and create content, finding the best type for you and more importantly your audience behaviors is key before proceeding to a larger content strategy.
There’s video that for majority of business pages is currently queen. And live video is the king. Video is extremely powerful especially on Facebook as it allows for a larger organic (not paid) reach while at the same time assisting you and your brand build up the “know, like, trust” factor.
Image-only content is another type that strictly means you add an owned image (one you took yourself) with a quick caption. It doesn’t link out anywhere. Facebook also tends to enjoy these pieces of content as it doesn’t tell your audience to click away from Facebook, therefore the platforms rewards you with a larger organic reach.
Text-only content is just that. Only text. No images. No link previews. This format that has gained popularity on Facebook with entrepreneurs who have a decent size following. They are using text-only posts to share their blog content natively within Facebook and then add a link, deleting the preview
Linked content, this could be shared video or a shared article either from your own content (like a blog) or curated content that you think your audience would enjoy from other sources.
Follower Count
This isn’t the end all be all indicator for social media success, but it does show how our overall content strategy is resonating with our audience. It also shows us a starting point before we implement a new strategy, plan or campaign.
Connecting the Dots
In addition, to knowing what content works on social, you have to also understand the parallel information of what content has the most traffic on your website. Where are people landing when they visit your website (besides the homepage, of course) and how are they getting there? That’s when Google Analytics comes in to play. Then when comparing notes, you can see if the majority of that traffic is from social media or perhaps you’re not even posting that particular blog post or page on your social media to drum up even more conversation and page views.
Looking to jumpstart your social media content and strategy, is all starts with a Social Media Audit. An audit in this sense is not a word that is meant to be scary, it’s simply a term to say that we’ll be popping the hood on all your social media platforms to give you a rundown of where you are so you know exactly where you’re going.