To run a successful campaign, it’s vital that you use social media monitoring tools so that you can track progress. Facebook stats for example indicate the virality of your different updates / links. You can very quickly see which messages are attracting the highest level of user engagement. You are then able to adapt your messages the most popular themes.
http://bit.ly will let you do the same for Twitter – This enables you to shrink the size of your links down so your tweets stay within 140 characters. But it does much more than this. You can also log in to your bit.ly account and see which links are the most popular with your audience.
A couple of other useful tools…
- Hootsuite: a social media monitoring tool that enables you to run several Twitter / Facebook accounts from one user-friendly interface and that also monitor who has mentioned you or re-tweeted you. You can even track who is discussing topics that may be relevant to your business. Hootsuite can also be set to deliver regular reports to your mailbox chartering the progress of your campaign.
- Klout: Gives you an indication of how influential you are on twitter on a scale of 1-100. It’s not an exact science, so don’t read too much into it, but the measure is based on the number of followers and how much they interact with you. You can see the Klout score of other users so it will help you decide who are the most influential people you should follow.
How do I measure results?
Finally it’s all very well getting thousands of likes and re-tweets, but how has that actually impacted on your business? If you have an enquiry form on your site, ask potential clients how they found out about you. Regularly check your website statistics to see how many visitors were referred from your social media campaign and how many converted into enquiries.
Like networking, social media is a slow burn. It’s not a relationship that can be built up overnight, but if you’re prepared to invest the time and patience to listen to your audience and then offer solutions to their problems, the rewards can be immense.
Your competitors may well be on Twitter and Facebook already, but if you can use social media the way it’s supposed to be used, you’ll already have a huge competitive advantage over them.
