Around 2009, small business followed the lead of big businesses and created pages on social network sites right and left. They might have heard somewhere on the Internet that social network is a great way to reach customers and profiles are free to set up, so why not?
A lot of those pages are graveyards now. They haven’t been updated in months and almost nobody Likes them. They didn’t even get a very good response when they were active.
A lot of businesses gave up once they didn’t see a surge in new customers, but no form of advertising can do that for very little work. Everything worth anything takes time and effort, and companies forgot that because they expected social network profiles to provide instant rewards with little effort. Social network requires effort just like any other form of marketing outreach, so how can you improve your social network marketing campaign?
Put some time into it
Casually telling your friends to Like your company page on Facebook won’t cut it. A few of their friends might see posts about your company, but social networks is all about contacting highly targetable customers.
Run an advertising campaign
Let’s say you run an insurance brokerage that sells medical insurance locally. Social networks like Facebook allow you to run targeted ads based on demographics, people’s interests, and even pages that people Like. You can make an ad that is directed toward people who Like, say, pages relating to medical insurance, or healthcare reform. Or, you can go even narrower and make an ad for health insurance with an orthopodic addendum that’s aimed at people who are in Facebook groups about foot health problems.
Social media monitoring
Most social networks have analytics tools that let you see the effectiveness of your advertising in terms of how many people click on your ads, but that’s where they stop. You aren’t able to find out whether or not people are talking about your company or your products. That’s why companies like Alerti offer social media monitoring services to let your company know what people are saying about you online, both on social networks and other forms of social media, like blogs.
Measure your success early
When you run a traditional advertising campaign, you have to wait weeks or more to see if you’re getting good results. Even AdSense campaigns take a while to get accurate results since the variance is so high and Google likes to show campaigns quick results so that they keep buying AdSense ads. However, social media monitoring tools let you get results instantly. When you sign up for a service like Alerti, you can see any social media post relating to certain keywords or linking back to certain URL’s. So, if you make a blog post about your company and promote it on social media, you can easily see if people are reposting your post and talking about it online. Furthermore, most social media monitoring tools have analytics that let you see where people are talking about you the most so that you can focus your marketing efforts on the appropriate social networks.
This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray and his company Influence People do blogger outreach work for a variety of clients, such as Alerti.
