Are you measuring your social media success? Do you understand how to measure your activities in social media? Do you know how to gather the right insight to help you achieve your social media goals? If not, let’s explore what you may need to know about measuring social media activities and building effective social media engagement strategies in conjunction with your Marketing Automation Platform (MAP).
A MAP can achieve a lot for a marketing team. From lead nurturing campaigns, to demand generation goals, to deep segmentation and custom analytics, a MAP can automate much of the entire engagement process; and when it comes to social media engagement, a MAP can manage and scale that, too.
Did you know that over 15 million consumers go to social media channels before making purchase decisions? According to a Forbes survey, 78% of respondents said that companies’ social media posts impact their purchases. Social media works because it enables customers to connect with their favorite companies. And vice versa -it enables companies to reach their target audiences.
Let’s take a look at several ways world class companies utilize their MAP to deliver an engaging experience to social media customers.
Defining targeted lists
Marketing Automation allows marketers to follow their most important prospects and monitor their activities. No matter at what stage of the sales cycle a lead may be in, it’s important to monitor them as well on social media. From mentioning keywords on Twitter, to subscribing to an RSS feed, to sharing an industry article, Marketing can get a good read on the things that matter to those companies in real time.
Automating and integrating all online tasks
An effective MAP works to automate all tasks between all social media channels. For example, when uploading a new video to YouTube, a Tweet can be automatically sent out to inform all your followers. When uploading a blog, it can be shared across all platforms – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and others. By doing this all in one platform, especially your MAP, it makes it easier for marketers as opposed to logging in to multiple sites on a continual basis.
Nurturing social media customers
MAPs utilize rich social data to identify active social media users and then works to further nurture them. No matter which social channel customers are interacting on, the right MAP has the ability to follow them through their customer journey, track their touch points, target them using the right content, and use the best channel to disseminate content to their prospective customers.
Measuring and tracking
Using lead scoring techniques, you can determine where your social media prospects are in the buying cycle. Have they been re-directed from an email to your Twitter account or Facebook page? Have they posted a question there? You can assign lead scores to prospect depending on the number of touch points they have had with you through your social media channels.
Automating publication time
The right MAP enables marketers to view the exact time and date when a post was published while gaining such data as the percentage rate of likes, comments and clicks. With this found knowledge, marketers are able to automatically publish at times that have seen the most activity and set a schedule to get the most views in the future.
As a modern marketer, the last thing you want to spend time on is the tedious, repetitive tasks of marketing, and you also know that engaging with social media users is a must. World class marketers know the importance of social media and use their MAP in an effort to gain and retain customers. Making the most out of social media customer engagement is part of a winning strategy for Best-in-Class performers who work to employ all efforts in order to interact with their audiences no matter the channel.
Where do you fare when it comes to your social media efforts?
