From this graphic (Douglass Karr), you can see that social media helps in achieving many business objectives. I am sure that all of you have some of these marketing goals in mind: Increased awareness, increased trust, always want to fill the funnel with leads, and of course close sales, and retain those customers!

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Some businesses don’t realize that social media can be a form of customer service! Sometimes customers or leads inquire through Twitter or Facebook rather than sending an email or calling. It’s important to have someone monitoring social and able to respond so you keep that trust!

Here is a real example of customer service through Facebook. This is a client who inquired about a fitness class and as you can see, the company, wrote back within 30 minutes responding to her question. Without having Facebook as a channel for customer interaction, they may not have had this business.

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Here’s the bottom line: A consistent social media presence helps your brand

Remain top of mind
Attract top talent
Gain customer feedback
Increase your relevancy
Set yourself apart from your competition

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The struggle is real. So many small businesses experience similar frustrations surrounding their social media presence. A few of those struggles include:

Not enough time
Too many platforms
Hard to measure
Confusing customer sentiment
Finding the right tools

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Choose the right platform. There are way too many platforms to have a good presence on each so choose a few that you can build out and make a commitment to.

A few ways to choose what platform is best for you:
- If you have had the chance to create buyer personas or perhaps customer profiles, then line those up with the demographic data of each social network to see what fits best. EX: If I have an ecommerce company, then LinkedIn might not be the best fit.

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Have set goals! Just like email, content, and search marketing, you have to have goals for your social media! Our goals for social media are to build brand awareness in the CRM and marketing automation industry, engage with existing customers, demonstrate thought leadership among in our field, and of course to generate soft leads…

A good way to hone in on your social media goals is to revisit your marketing objectives and see where social can augment or help those.

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Choose your hot topics. Every brand in every industry has a few things they know A LOT about. Make it obvious to your customer that you are an expert in these areas by fleshing out and sharing a lot of content surrounding those topics.

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Google is not the only place to search! Conduct searches on the platforms you are using. For example, this is Twitter search. Simply type in twitter.com/search (and this is an advanced search)

A great tool for evaluating your hashtags you want to use in your social posts is RiteTag. This will not only show you how much interaction this hashtag gets, but it will also suggest alternative related hashtags. I get ideas for content just from scoping out hashtags!

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Measurement is important!

Tracking performance data is the best way to identify which tactics are working and which aren’t. Most importantly, you’ll want to watch for growth, engagement, and sharing. There are a lot of analytics tools you can use but I think the best are the analytics the platforms themselves provide.
For Twitter, go to Twitter analytics. Here you can see growth over different periods of time, engagement, sharing, and even what topics your top engagers are most interested in!

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