Social Media Strategy | The Real Bruce

Most of us love to talk. We want to be stars or the center of attention. That is why we love Social Media. We love to tell people what we are doing and what is important to us. We also all believe that people actually care.

With that in mind as businesses, it gives us a fantastic opportunity, TO LISTEN. With all of these followers, friends and fans, we have access to a huge database of information, thoughts and ideas. Best of all, these thoughts come from people who are interested enough to have made the initial connection.

We now have, at our fingertips, information that has never been available before. Instant updates as to when someone might be hungry or when someone is out shopping. We can know if someone is looking for a new car, or just ate at the restaurant we own. If we just take the time to listen, we can learn a lot.

After listening, we need to act, of course. Thank the customers for their business, send them a link to a car you sell, or invite them to your next function to get to know them better.

There are many tools out there that make the listening easier and can help you interact better, but the main point is to listen. Social media is a very powerful tool, but sometimes we use it incorrectly. Try changing your approach–Talk less and listen more. It will pay you dividends.

While running an Social Media Agency in Indianapolis, I often get ask about Social Media and Marketing, and how to see the ROI of it. Of course business owners always want to see numbers that directly correlate with their investment and this is where the challenge comes in the Social Media world.

While we can measure a lot of things on the web, the social media impact is one that comes a little harder. Sure we can do the traditional Google Analytics and measure the number of hits, time spent, and bounce rate of your website, but what does that truly tell you about the effectiveness of your Social Media Strategy.

“Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement” by Brian Haven of Forrester Research identifies four areas of engagement that can be measured. Engagement is the name of the game when it comes to social media and measuring successes and failures.

* Involvement: Just how involved is the community you’re engaging with? Are they visiting your site? Are they subscribing to your blog? How many video views do you have? Did they request information from your site or from a member of your team?

* Interactions: How are your efforts working in the way of gauging interactions? Are fan visits to your fan page increasing? Have those fans started conversations? How many replies to a post in a forum have you received? How many comments are your blog posts getting?
* Intimacy: Intimacy demonstrates the level of comfort/love/hate your audience feels with your company brands, products, or services. How much user generated content such as videos, photos, blog review sites or even threads in forums are being generated around your company? How many ratings are you receiving? What is the sentiment of your ratings or product/service comments?

* Influence: Just how much influence are your efforts (or those of other influencers) having on your strategy? How willing are people to recommend you? Did you get a brand awareness lift with your efforts? Are influencers sharing their opinions and are they creating user generated content around your products/services?

There are so many ways to measure the four I’s, you could count the number of blog comments on a new blog post, you can look at how many friends you have added on Facebook, or you could determine a number that would be “successful” to tracking how far a link was created and spread through Twitter. But that is just the one step of all this, you still need to look at the traditional monitoring numbers as well.

Basically there is not simple report or one statistic to look at. Each company will measure their success a little differently in the Social world. This is where a Social Media Agency can be helpful. We can help you clearly define what you want to accomplish for your business and help you measure all these different avenues to determine success.
Don’t move forward on your social media activity until you have clearly defined what your plans are and what you will consider a success, as you can see without these your efforts will prove frustrating and your results will be confusing.

The Real Bruce

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