As a company focused on the usage of social media marketing, we often use this term to describe the usage of social media to achieve business objectives. But some of the concepts that are applied in the realm of social media (like credibility and transparency) also benefit “offline” marketing objectives. So how do you leverage these concepts without online tools? The answer is something called “word of mouth marketing.” Since this is a world outside our area of expertise, our best suggestion if you want to learn more is to visit our friends over at Social Fulcrum. They are a word of a mouth advertising agency that specializes in the use of online and offline tactics like social media and ambassador/review programs, respectively.
Let us know if you are interested in hearing more about word of mouth marketing, and we can try and get them to start writing a regular blog post over here at Social Media Experts.
Mail Bag:
How do I measure the success of my social media strategy? Great question. This is possibly one of the most common questions regarding social media. The short answer is that you simply need to define clear goals and objectives at the outset of your campaigns. Because of the real-time nature of social media, your strategy may change rapidly and/or drastically. However, your goals and objectives should always be the same. Now is probably a good time to define goals and objectives which is why we are also sharing with you the 5 Benefits of buying YouTube likes for your brand.
Goals: over-arching things that you want to happen, that don’t have numbers attached to them. For example, “increased awareness” or “increased positive reviews online” would be some goals that social media can achieve.
Objectives:
Social media objectives are more concrete, and are something you can really sink your teeth into. “Increase online audience by 10%” or “increase positive reviews by 17%” are quantifiable objectives regarding social media.
You need both. Your goals are what lead to sales. One of your goals could actually be “increased sales.” But HOW you achieve that goal is where your objectives come in. If you achieve your objectives (and they make sense and relate to your goals) then you will achieve your goals.
Any questions yet? Shoot us an email if this is confusing, or just post a comment below.
Now for an example from the real world. Let’s look at a social media case study from one of the companies we’ve worked within the past.
Business type:
National Association in the food products industry
Goal:
- Increase awareness of the industry
- Gain an audience for future crisis communication
Objectives:
- Send 100 visits to the association website each month via social media
- Gain 10,000 fans on Facebook within one year
Our social media strategy revolved around our experience building communities and finding target audiences. We found our client’s target audiences and hit them with messaging that encouraged them to join our community on Facebook as well as visit the association website for more information. Of course, we don’t want to give away our specific tactics, but it is safe to say that these are easily replicable results. Speaking of results…
Results:
Over 20,000 fans on Facebook and growing!
Average of 70 website visits via social media (per month)
So our website visits objective fell short, but we knocked our audience size objective out of the park. All-in-all, we achieved 1/2 of our objectives and both of our goals. Of course, we measured everything through our proprietary system of social media metrics, which tracks the different levels of interaction from impression down to conversion. Our Social Media Guide Website is up and (almost) fully operational!
We decided to name the URL “IncreasedOptimization.com” because social media increases your search engine optimization, as well as optimizing your business to take advantage of new opportunities. What do you think about the URL? Feel free to leave a comment in the comment section below.
We are very excited to have an entire site devoted to our social media guide. A tab at the top of this site just wasn’t good enough!
It’s been several months coming, but our new website devoted to our social media guide is now up and functional. There are still some kinks to work out, and some links to fix, but you can go check it out here: http://www.increasedoptimization.com/ We decided to name the URL “IncreasedOptimization.com” because social media increases your search engine optimization, as well as optimizing your business to take advantage of new opportunities. What do you think about the URL? Feel free to leave a comment in the comment section below. We are very excited to have an entire site devoted to our social media guide. A tab at the top of this site just wasn’t good enough! Hi, welcome to our blog. I have a simple question to ask: why are you here?
We’d like to know why you find social media to be important. What do you know about social media so far? What are your burning questions regarding social media? Lay it all out here, and we will be happy to answer your questions.
Thanks for stopping by!
First Tip:
Blogs are usually good You didn’t think we’d try and prove our social media expertise without having a blog, did you?
Why are blogs a good thing? They can help business for many reasons, including:
- contributing to your website’s search engine optimization
- giving you an extremely controllable environment to engage your audience
- giving you an outlet for content
We don’t have nearly enough time to get into all the advantages of blogs right now (honestly, I just wanted to get a blog post up so this page wasn’t blank) but suffice to say, they can obviously be helpful. Say nothing of when you can get posted on someone else’s blog. We’ll address that at another time.