Social Media Best Practices for Business Contributor Partners

Social media has changed the communication landscape for Business, Retailers and Business Professionals as marketers, and now is the time to take advantage of this opportunity

We know it can be hard to keep up, so the next time you’re in a pinch and don’t know how to solve a social media problem, consult this list; you might find the answer you’re looking for among these social media best practices. We’ve developed this comprehensive list of tactics based on more than 25 years of successfully creating award winning educational marketing programs, almost 20 years  of experience creating and designing SEO, SMO & SEM best practices for our business and our customers business and crafting and developing community built websites and communities for both our business at Webland, our clients at Webland and MCC Partners and our business partners including thousands of  customer reviews, colleague interviews, and internal research.

The beauty of social media is distinguished by your ability to adopt a unique voice, tone, and approach that suits your Business and your personality as a business professional and importantly your customers. Use these best practices as guiding principles to help you create and execute an effective strategy to win sales.

Contents

SOCIAL SMO  1  |   About Webland……………………….……4

SOCIAL SMO  2  |   Learn Social Listening……………..……………..5

SOCIAL SMO  3  |   Get Engaged Social Engagement…………………8

SOCIAL SMO  4  |   Learn Social Publishing………………..…….….. 12

SOCIAL SMO  5  |   Learn Social Advertising………..…..…….………15

SOCIAL SMO  6  |   How do you Measure………..……………..…….17

SOCIAL SMO  7  |   Conclusion…………..……………………..……..22

SOCIAL SMO  8  |   Appendix ..…List of Useful Social Media Sites …..…… 23

Webland is an advertising calculator and marketing planning tool.

When business become engaged with Webland their customers and clients begin to post on top social media sites and Apps including but not limited to all of those we suggest at the end of this guide.  Customers will post while shopping and buying to invite friends to vote / up- vote their image or video tagged with your business name, location and contact info #vote@my/image#yourbusiness #vote@my/video#yourbusiness which of advertising manager drives traffic and engagement to the content you have created.

We hope you are able to benefit from our teams efforts to compile a comprehensive social media guide for you, please share with your fellow business professionals, CMO’s, CEO’s, and business unit leaders’s and others in your world of business contacts who may benefit from increased engagement and revenue!  MWS

Webland Business Advertising Calculator and Marketing Tools are available to all business leaders and professionals who wish to contribute content to enrich their success in advertising.

Social SMO 2

Learn and Develop Social Media Listening

Your process starts with social listening. Social media listening, also known as social media monitoring, is the process of identifying and analyzing what is being said about you and your business on the Internet. While it doesn’t need to be the first thing you do when you wake up or the last thing you do before you go to bed, it should be the first thing you do when constructing a social media strategy. Here are some ideas to enhance your social listening plan.

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Understand why and where people are talking about you.

The first step in the process is tuning your social antennae to the right channels. You may have an obvious list of places where people discuss your business & business; if so, make sure you properly monitor them. Remember that there are numerous places within your social properties where people can talk about you. Instagram posts, Facebook pages, Twitter hashtags, and LinkedIn groups, for example, are all potential places where you can learn about social sentiment toward you.

Extend Your Reach Go beyond Facebook and Twitter.

Remember, major social networks are not the only places on the web where people talk about you. Try using a social monitoring tool to find where people are discussing your business and look at smaller sites that may not initially come under your radar. Here are few other places you could look:

SnapChat, Blogs Plus YouTube, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, and other popular social sites  Review sites Social bookmarking sites Comment sections on industry and trade publication websites Popular mobile apps

Get Your Staff to help Create a keyword list that extends your listening reach beyond profile.

People won’t always mention you or your business by name when talking about you. They may spell your name wrong, use an abbreviation, or simply talk about your industry without specifically calling you out. Accurately recording this information will enhance your listening analysis. Put together a list of words people may use to describe you, your business your industry, and your competitors, and track conversation a product those keywords across the social web. There may be some noise you need to filter out, but you’ll most likely acquire information you would not have seen otherwise.

Make listening a business-wide member-wide & company-wide endeavour.

Customers will appreciate being included, whether you’ve got an engagement team of one person or two dozen, everyone in the business should be on alert for mentions, both positive and negative. Create a reporting and communication plan for employees. For example, have everyone email online business mentions to one, central email like socialmentions@yourbusiness.com. This will not only give you more information, but could also provide additional places for you to track mentions.

“Whether you’ve got an engagement team of one person or two dozen, everyone in the company should be involved.” Jimmy Wright PGA  @ jimmyw@golf4millions.com

Take your time & Listen carefully to influencers in your community and industry.

In the business community, there are those people who have established themselves as influential contributors. They often have large social followings, publish regularly to blogs, and speak at conferences. You want to create a list of these people and closely monitor what they are saying and how people are responding to them. Because they are regularly talking to your customers and potential customers, they are in a position to deliver authentic feedback on a consistent basis. Create a listening schedule that includes their blog posts, Twitter chats, Facebook mentions, LinkedIn forums, and so on.

Develop a plan & Create categories to organize mentions.

Any number of topics may become part of your social media branded business conversation. You’ll likely find this information flows into your stream in one large, unstructured mass. By assigning categories and manually (or automatically) moving content into categories, you’ll have a far better time reporting and understanding what people say about you. Keep your categories flexible to account for any changes you may need to make to your organizational structure.

Design & Draft listening reports to help shape future marketing projects.

When you’re listening to dozens of sources across social media, you’ll likely find yourself sitting on a mountain of data. Creating solid reports is the only way you’ll be able to extract useful information. Try putting together the following information:

• Sentiment analysis • Total mentions • Active networks • Pain-points

Ask data-related questions such as, “Are mentions going up or down over time?” or “Is positive sentiment increasing?” Doing this on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis will help present these insights to your team and shape current and future campaigns. Don’t let your business be deaf to the way people perceive you in the marketplace; you can effect change through social listening.

Why think about bad stuff? Create a crisis management plan before it’s too late.

Have you considered that social media adds a whole new level to the crisis management model? In today’s social landscape you may pick up the beginning of a crisis while listening to social channels, and you should be ready to act immediately. Creating a plan requires a lot of coordination and involves many within your business, including CEO, VP of Product or CMO, and any number of customers. It wont be easy, and getting everyone in one room to plan for a hypothetical situation can be challenging. But, when the alternative is an evolving crisis and no plan of action, you’ll be glad you put something to paper and prepared in advance.

Calculate what automation techniques work for you and allocate resources where it makes the most sense. You’ll be more productive and your staff will be happier doing work that can’t be done by a robot.”

Use your best people. Automate what you can, but don’t remove the human element.

The social listening process may be overwhelming depending on the size of your business. Social listening tools can help by automatically tagging certain keywords and assigning mentions to users based on subject matter. These automation steps can improve efficiency and allow you to spend more time engaging with people. But, you can’t leave it all to computers. Figure out what automation techniques work for you and allocate humans where it makes the most sense. You’ll be more productive and your staff will be happier doing work that can’t be done by a robot.

A little bit artsy but worthwhile: Sentiment analysis is a mixed bag, so fine-tune the results.

Sentiment analysis refers to how you determine a consumer’s attitude toward your business. Sentiment analysis tactics continue to improve over time, but there are some posts that simply won’t be properly tagged. Sarcasm, in particular, really trips up sentiment analysis programs, and for good reason. Keeping this in mind, you should always take a sample of your analyzed content when conducting sentiment analysis and make sure it looks properly tagged. Depending on sample size, you may want to manually switch over mentions that are not properly tagged. Note that doing this for every post is not realistic and defeats the purpose of using a tool, but you want to make sure you feel comfortable releasing your results.

Social SMO 3

Get Engaged:  Social Engagement

Now that you’ve set up your social listening program to hear what’s being said about your  business online, it’s time to join the conversation. Engaging with your community, prospective customers, customers, and detractors is an integral part of a healthy social media strategy. Here are ways to improve your engagement strategy.

Create awareness.

If you don’t have a big-budget marketing plan, you can still create strong business awareness. Social media platforms offer the potential to increase your public profile even without purchasing ads. You can create effective awareness campaigns by using social engagement techniques such as:

  • Engaging with influencers in your industry

  • • Sharing content from these influencers and staying active in conversations

• Keeping a profile full of updated, worthwhile content

• Offering influencers exclusive content, news, and product deals

• Inviting consumers “behind the scenes” to see business development, meet your team, and more

Remember, campaigning for awareness is not the same as campaigning for a sale. Always decide what kind of engagement you’re seeking, define your strategy, and measure the effectiveness based on your goals.

Be mindful of oversharing.

While it’s important to stay in the loop and maintain social relationships, posting too often, whether it’s photos, status updates, or frequent tweets, can irritate your audience. Delivering focused, exciting content less often will yield better results than curating fifty bad & erroneous messages an hour. Here are a few ideas to keep you focused:

• Refrain from posting every time you think of something to say.

• Create a content calendar with a posting schedule and stick to it, this can form part of your business season events schedule.

• Think about what will provide value down the road.

• Simplify your messages. Everyone is on a schedule and social consumers appreciate clear and concise content

Don’t always feel compelled to jump in.

Some things are better left unsaid. You don’t always have to respond every time someone mentions your business. In fact, it’s sometimes better to let individual staff, influencers, or other customers of the community interject before or instead of you. If you jump in at the wrong time, you might send the wrong message. So pick your conversations wisely and determine what type of posts you want to respond to and which ones you want to leave alone.

Importantly Be as transparent as your business allows.

Openness can go a long way in social media. Creating a transparent communication model will help your community feel involved in your business and appreciate the trust you show toward them. They may become interested in your story, want to get involved in your special or event trials, or stay in touch with updates. That hook may be what you need to generate new, long-term customers. Here are a few ways to be more transparent:

  • Turn your CEO, Director of Business or Head of sales loose on Twitter.
    • Take your customers behind the scenes. Do a video walk-through of your business

• Actively solicit feedback.

• Introduce your team. Let your customers meet and chat with your staff online.

Determine your tone.

Showing personality and moving away from corporate-speak is a great way to interact with people on social media. What you say and how you say it are important to your online business perception. Try creating a business style guide to express key messaging and tone. This will give employees, new hires, and business ambassadors a great idea of how to shape your story online. Your followers should know what to expect from you when you speak, but to make that happen, you need to establish an internal style document and follow it.

Help your customers become experts, too.

As an expert at business your industry, you have accumulated a ton of knowledge about the industry, products, and services. Share what you’ve learned with your customers and community. Here are a few approaches:

• Make an effort to answer every question. Pay attention to the questions your customers are asking, and start putting them on the FAQs section of your website. If a customer asks a question and it’s not part of your FAQ section, use it as an opportunity to add the question and assist future customers in self-serving themselves.

• Lead by example. Do case studies, post successes, and share learning moments on your blog, and lead your customers and guests to your conversation spaces by adding only relevant share buttons.

• You don’t have to sound like an expert. Just be helpful.

        Be proactive.  Business is traditionally reactive, proactive social marketing requires you to closely monitor general feeds. You can be proactive by listening and contributing to conversations before someone even mentions your business name. For example terms and phrases like:

• Bad store cleanliness Conditions

  • bad service

• Bad product Conditions

• Waiting on hold or to check out

This will help you gauge the attitudes and trends and cater your messages accordingly.

Respond to negative AND positive feedback.

Three rules of thumb for responding to positive feedback:

  • Thank them. Thank your audience for positive remarks left on your blog post, Twitter feed, or Facebook wall.

• Return the favour. Is someone sharing your original content on Twitter? Take note of their latest post and share it with your network.

• Add them as a guest contributor. Remember those individuals who really have the voice and passion to contribute something of value that your community will relish.

Three rules of thumb for responding to negative feedback:

• Respond quickly. Social media users have come to expect a rapid response.

• Don’t delete. Your customers may view this as a sign your business is dishonest and trying to hide the truth. Remember, if you delete feedback, it can be posted other places and this will reflect poorly on your business or instructors.

  •     Please Don’t feed the trolls. Stay focused on the constructive criticism. If someone obviously is out to get you and tarnish your name, it’s better to not play into their game by reaching out to them via social media. Instead, send them your customer service email address or phone number and allow them to contact you directly if they want to have a real conversation.

Please Keep it short.

Keep your audience in mind when crafting your social media messages. Don’t overload them with long, exhausting content. Chances are, they are seeing your messages during what little down time they can find during the day. Respect their time by crafting short messages they can easily digest. You reduce the risk of losing their interest and your response rates will undoubtedly go up.

Consider following back.

One of the reasons teenagers have a stronger following than you is their relentless pursuit of following everyone that follows them, better known as #teamfollowback. While this may not be realistic for a business professional or business, especially the bigger the audience, following those that follow you is a kind gesture and will help grow your overall following. Keep your influencers happy and show you care about what they have to say—not just that they are listening to you. Additionally, when you follow back, you might get some public responses from key influencers, giving you added exposure.

Social SMO 4

Social Publishing

The beauty of social networking lies in its two-way conversation value between retailers (Business Contributors or Leaders) and consumers (Clients and Customers). There is plenty of room, however, for promotion communication that comes directly from your business. There’s a lot to consider before tweeting or posting these kinds of messages. Take a look at these best practices for a better approach to social publishing.

Treat each social network as its own entity.

Try sharing different content on your social properties. Even if you want to share the same thing across mediums, make sure you’re using each social network the way it was meant to be used, and to the best of its abilities. For example, a Facebook post doesn’t need to be below 140 characters like a tweet, and can include larger image sizes than an Instagram post. Include custom calls to action as each social network has its own ways in which users can interact with your posts.  Visit Gary Vaynerchuk for more information on this subject: https://youtu.be/OnXijAxiy8g

Always provide an option to share.

One of the best aspects of social media publishing is the ability for content to spread virally. Viral reach can mean a lot of things; it doesn’t have to lead to six million YouTube views. If 30 people with 1,000 followers each retweet a link you post, you’ve increased your reach by 30,000. Posting to social networks automatically gives sharing functionality, but your web content might not. Make sure you always provide people a way to share to their own networks easily.

Set up publishing and approval permissions and processes.

Before you start, determine who has what publishing permissions. Establish your team:

• Identify Your Voice • Administrators • Publisher • Authors • Editors

“Don’t underestimate the importance of this job.  Most people know and understand the importance of limiting who can speak on behalf of a large corporation or a medium sized business.  Established business rarely allow anyone other than very senior executives or specifically trained communication personnel to communicate on behalf of an organization.  Meanwhile more often than not I witness small business of all stripes delegating the communications role to the most junior employee.  You should ask who is your best salesperson. Social in particular is a conversation and quite often quick thinking is required and very often no comment is the best comment.  Put your best foot forward and use your best voice.” MWS

Some social networks, like Facebook, set up permissions natively for admins, while many require the use of a third-party tool. Regardless of how you do it, map out your approval hierarchy to ensure the only people

who can publish to your networks are those who have access.

Build for mobile. Use Webland Free Resources

We’re a society glued to our phones and tablets. Mobile is, increasingly, the way people access digital and social content. With that in mind, it’s your responsibility to build your business online assets with mobile top-of-mind. If you’re building a website, make sure the design includes CSS or responsive web and responds easily to mobile and any additional capabilities, such as social sharing, work across mobile devices. Ease of use is key. The less work people need to do on their phones to access your content, the more willing they’ll be to stick with you.

 “If you’re building a website, make sure the design responds easily to mobile and any additional capabilities, such as social sharing, work across mobile devices.”

“Find a way to schedule content regularly throughout the evenings and weekends to take advantage of times when people may have longer attention spans.”

If You Can Don’t forget about nights and weekends.

You might work Monday through Friday from 7-7, but your community is running their own schedule and checking social networks outside of your normal work hours. Think about all of the times throughout the week when you check your Twitter feed or watch a YouTube video. Including nights and weekends enables you to make your content stand out when many others aren’t posting. Find a way to schedule content regularly throughout off times and weekends to take advantage of times when people may have longer attention spans. Additionally, if resources allow, consider adding a team member in another time schedule to expand coverage.

You Have it Use It: Use your social networks to promote existing content.

Distribution is one of the biggest benefits of building a large social network. You’ve got a ton of great content you want to share, so use your social networks to do so. Experiment with different headlines and post types to find what is most effective to maximize traffic. Repurpose content that is just laying aproduct the office. For example, create an infographic out of an old presentation, newsletter or event, or go through your last 3 months of emails and use customer inquiries and questions as blog topics. Just be careful not to overdo it. If you’re always posting your own content, people may grow tired.

Talk to your Customers: Use your data to determine what works.

If you haven’t tried it check out Survey Monkey, its easy to use and you can do short surveys for free. Everyone can tell you something different when it comes to the best times to publish, the best content, the best post types, and the best calls to action. But, only you have the data to make that decision for your business. Do some A/B testing with your publishing strategies, and then assess what worked best for you after you collected a large enough sample size. Never stop experimenting and develop your own best practices.

Set a content calendar that syncs up with other marketing objectives.

Your business organization may have a few different event & marketing calendars. There may be an overarching event calendar that covers broad event & marketing campaigns or an calendar to cover industry-relevant topics. Additionally, you may have a content calendar to map out blog posts and large-scale content objectives and one for social publishing. Make sure these calendars aren’t isolated from one another. Your social publishing calendar should reflect other business and marketing objectives. They don’t have to match up exactly, but you don’t want to stray too far from the rest of the organization, or you’ll have a hard time accomplishing your business goals.

Implement tracking codes on links.

Social attribution is a great way to prove the return on investment (ROI) for social publishing. We’ll talk more about ROI in the measuring section, but with publishing, it can be helpful to post links that have a tracking code built into them. This tracking code will then feed back into an overall database, helping you track what social networks are driving the most traffic. Use this data to guide your posting strategies for big content and marketing campaigns moving forward.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with different platforms and content.

Social media is always changing and giving us new ways to engage with customers and golfers. Social networks are constantly tinkering with their platforms, and new networks seem to pop up each month. While you should avoid throwing a ton of resources at shiny new objects, don’t be afraid to take a chance and find a way to make new platforms work for your business. By doing something creative, you may find yourself garnering attention for the way you were able to turn a new social network or social network feature into a boost for your business.

Social SMO 5

Social Advertising

Organic and viral reach is great if you can get it, but in an increasingly competitive marketplace for consumer attention, paid advertising on social media is a critical part of any social media strategy. Most Business Contributors have limited budgets but a few dollars can go a long way in a single community target approach.  Here are some tips on how to get started.

Budget (if you have one) Set your advertising goals first.

Unlike other forms of social media marketing, paid advertising involves money. This seems obvious, but it means there is more at stake if you aren’t getting results; namely, your advertising budget. So before you get started, think about the reasons you want to advertise on social media and what you want to get out of it. With clear goals, more student, more products or more events? You can make better adjustments if things aren’t working and better understand success or failure.

Create both daily and lifetime budgets for your campaigns.

Depending upon the social network you’re advertising on, payment works differently. Google Ad Words and Facebook, for instance, uses a bidding system in which the most competitive bids will earn the right to display ads to users. Setting your budget for both the entire length of a campaign, as well as on a daily basis, will help you decide which ads to run when. It will also allow you to roughly look at your day-to-day requirements, while simultaneously matching them up with your overall spending capabilities.

Fit your social campaigns in you time budget and the context of other initiatives.

There may be times when you want to run social media ads separate from other marketing initiatives, and that’s fine. But, most likely, your social media ads will coincide with other promotions. To create cohesion, make sure your creative, messaging, and targeting coincides with the rest of your traditional promotions and advertising.

Research the social advertising platforms.

Each social network has different advertising capabilities based on the unique features available to users. For instance, a video campaign makes sense on YouTube or split up on Vine, whereas a link to a new business service or product may be best as a link within a promoted tweet or LinkedIn update. Regardless of the best platform for your campaign, familiarize yourself with your options so that you can make the best decision.

Regardless of the best platform for your campaign, familiarize yourself with your options so that you can make the best decision.

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Match available targeting options with your advertising objectives.

Part of the allure of social media advertising is the available targeting options. Putting your content in front of the right people has never been easier (or more accurate) than it is on social media. But, before you get started, consider what you want to accomplish with your targeting. Do you want to target people who already show an affinity toward you? Would you prefer to attract new customers? You are looking for a certain demographic, make sure you match it n your campaigns. Or maybe you’re running a promotion in a certain demographic and want to look to people in that area. All of these options, and more, are possible with social media advertising.

Test, test, test. Survey and Test your Customers too.

Business that focus on advanced targeting of their social ads also use A/B testing to improve their results. The best way to determine the success of something is to have two small test groups and show them different versions of the same promoted content. The one that performs better is the one that is used on the balance of the list. Make sure the variable is limited to one element, like the headline, image, or call to action, but not all three. You can create your groups by targeting, but you need to make sure you have a big enough audience to make the time and effort worthwhile. Try not to get too granular with your targeting. This will severely undercut your ad’s  effectiveness by limiting the number of people who see it.

For busy GM’s and owners of Business Automate wherever possible.

Marketers have become comfortable with automated algorithms running many types of online ads, such as pay-per-click and Google banner ads. The next stage for using social ads is to utilize a platform that makes optimization decisions based on performance. If an ad gets a lot of engagement and clicks, the budget can be increased automatically. An under-performing ad can be turned off the same way. You don’t have to worry about a campaign going out of control in the middle of the night. In addition to showing the right ads at the right time to the right people, automated social ads provide better data and analytics. This gives you more actionable insights from your campaigns and ultimately improves performance of the social ads.

Don’t forget about time of day and scheduling.

Just as it’s important not to forget about nights and weekends when publishing, timing can be everything for your social ad effectiveness. Some testing is required to figure out when your ads are most effective, though there may be some more obvious publishing times. For instance, if your business is locally known as exclusive, you may want to run ads in advance of a holiday event to entice them to bring family and friends to experience your business environment. Look at the times and days where people are most engaged with your ad, and devote more of your budget to those times once you feel your sample size is large enough.

Social SMO 6: How Do You Measure?

Advertising campaigns are living processes that require constant monitoring and adjustment.

Determine the metrics that will best represent your campaign status.

Entirely unique in advertising, social media ads give you a wealth of results data. Because social networks can track so many different actions taken by users, they often create robust analytics reports that will help you determine the effectiveness of your advertising campaign. Create a list of metrics that are most important to you before you get started so that you can monitor them more closely; this will tie in to the advertising goal you set before you get started. As your campaign progresses, either make changes to optimize the results of these metrics, or determine whether these metrics are actually the best indicators of your success.

Establish your analytics rhythm.

Advertising campaigns are living, breathing processes that require constant monitoring and fine-tuning. But, the only way to determine needed adjustments is to look at your results on a regular basis. Schedule a regular meeting with your necessary stakeholders to go over the performance of your campaign. Even if things are going according to plan, it’s good to have everyone on the same page. Getting in a rhythm will also make internal sharing a lot easier, as those involved will have regular updates on the campaign performance.

Social Measurement

Establish the right technology, people, and processes to ensure you always know how your efforts are performing. Social media measurement allows you to make decisions regarding fixes or tweaks midway through a campaign.

Align your objectives with your metrics.

An effective measurement strategy should align directly with your objectives. Define Your Goals and use best practices. Be Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time in defining your goals:

• Be Specific: Establish objectives that are specific to your desired results. For example, if your objective is to increase business awareness, try a more focused approach such as, “Increase business awareness by 10% in the next six months through a targeted social media campaign.”

• Be Measurable: Use consistent metrics in your review process to verify the effectiveness of your efforts. Outlining your objectives helps you assess your results and decide how to move forward in the future. Count your increase in products or increase in services.

• Be Achievable: Often, a goal of 85% customer satisfaction is more attainable than a goal of 99% customer satisfaction. The same is true for your social media plan, so consider what’s feasible when setting your objectives. How much business can your business handle?

  • Be Relevant: Your goals should always support your business’s big- picture plans. Goals that are worthwhile, align with other internal goals, and champion your team will always receive

better support.

• Insure you are Timed: Incorporate a time frame into your objectives to make yourself accountable for their fruition. Utilize tools like content calendars, review and edit timelines, and analytic checklists to make your objectives more real and tangible.

Pick a goal.

As the saying goes, “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.” Good social media goals are usually in line with the greater goals of your organization. Here are some popular ones:

• Increase awareness
• Generate sales
• Convert leads to sales
• Retain existing and recurring customers
• Increase customers
• Create event opportunities

Pick a goal. If you have the resources and the time, you may pick all of these goals. However, it’s much better to execute well on one of these goals than to dilute your efforts.

Segment and trend.

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, help you determine your social campaign successes. It may take some time to narrow down your KPIs, so until then, keep slicing and dicing your analytics. For example, if you’re trying to figure out if your new Facebook efforts are driving awareness you might look at:

• New visitors from Facebook
• New visitors from Facebook with more than three page-views
• New visitors from Facebook that purchased a product or service package

Lastly, you’ll want to look at how your KPIs trend over time. For instance, did your recent Twitter ad buy increase your metrics over the prior month?

Track and measure social media leads and purchases.

You can track revenue in different ways depending on your business model. Business professionals may label a lead as a person who has watched a product video completed. A business  may track users who have perused or purchased a product, or someone who signed up for their company newsletter, (also provided free to contributing business by Webland if they do not have their own. Regardless of what you call it, make sure you can properly attribute leads and revenue that comes from social media.

Measure cost savings.

Sometimes the value in a new business endeavour isn’t about what goes up (like revenue), but what comes down (like costs). Social media can have some very clear efficiencies, most notably on the customer service side, but also in areas like training or communications. In particular, this is great for tracking savings that come from using social media for customer service. You can cut down on wasted ad dollars by using Webland Advertising calculator.

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Create a central dashboard to bring in disparate metrics.

One of the big problems with measuring social media campaigns is that data is all over the place. You may have some data directly from social networks, some from third-party tools, and some from internal analytics. This can make analyzing a campaign incredibly frustrating. Try compiling all this data into one central dashboard for easy viewing. You can use numbers, charts, graphs, and so on, but putting everything in one place ensures you aren’t missing anything while removing redundancies and superfluous information. It makes reviewing data a whole lot easier.

Flexibility is a definite advantage of social media; if you suddenly want to change the direction of a campaign, it requires very little time and effort.

Determine how you’ll define ROI.

ROI is and will, for quite some time, be the magic three letters in social media marketing. Everyone wants an answer to the question, “How do I track ROI on my social media efforts?” Many are understandably frustrated when there is no single answer to this question. Social media gives more information than your other marketing efforts, but you have to know what to do with it. Even if you aren’t driving directly to a commerce page, it’s important to decide what series of actions a user could take that eventually would lead to a sale. Once you have this data, you can figure out how to track it before you start your campaign. Be patient when you begin, it takes time to grow.

Switch Gears & Be prepared to pivot on everything.

Flexibility is a de nite advantage of social media; if you suddenly want to change the direction of a campaign, it requires very little time and effort. That’s why regularly conversing with those who have a hand in your social media campaigns to go over metrics is critical for your success. These meetings may lead to a change in a direction, tone, or even the actual metrics you’re using to define success. Constantly reviewing whether you’re looking at the right data is as important to your success as looking at the success of your content.

If Possible Consider every available measurement tool.

Using all your available resources to calculate data is the best way to track your successes. Whether that means using pre-populated spreadsheets from third-party tools like Webland, Google Analytics or HootSuite, looking at social network analytics sections, or even whipping out a calculator and crunching numbers the old-school way, don’t skimp out on measuring your data. It’s the only way to know whether you’re on the right path with your social media efforts, and can greatly impact the way you operate moving forward.

Metrics aren’t for everyone.

We all know the usual social media data points:

  •   Likes
    • Shares
    • Comments
    • Retweets
    • Shots Sold

  •   Products Played

These can be great and useful pieces of information based on your campaign goals. But, don’t feel compelled to look at these metrics just because everyone else is doing it. In fact, it’s possible the best metrics for you are not available in network analytics or third-party tools. Do what you need to do to get the most out of the available data, and don’t feel the need to limit yourself to the popular crowd of social media metrics.

Do what you need to do to get the most out of the available data, and don’t feel the need to limit yourself to the popular crowd of social media metrics.

Conclusion

This list of social media best practices is here to help enhance your existing strategy. Don’t overwhelm yourself or immediately overhaul your entire social marketing plan with these tips. Try one or two of the suggestions from each section, run your tests to see whether they work, and then hold on to or move away from each best practice. We hope this list gets you thinking differently about the ways you approach your advertising manager or business business development. And if you’ve got your own best practices, keep up the good work!

For tools that get results and start conversations that convert, discover Webland social marketing solutions at Webland.ca