3 tips to impact social media in 2018
Reach your platform potential
Working with a community of 5000+ users across 50+ countries, we really strive to find the social media trends that work for businesses. Even though social media is the place where most people gather, many businesses are still struggling with capitalizing on its opportunities. Here are my three key tips to help you reach your platform potential and social maturity.
For most, the potential is simply not clear, mainly because the proven ROI is not visible in their current setup. Good news is that it is often only a matter of workflows to start tapping into customer lifetime values, automation, and user journeys that ensure conversions in a scalable model across your entire stack. Here are three tips to take into consideration for leveraging social in 2018:
1. Understand the premise
No matter your objectives and no matter if we are working with customer service, sales, marketing or branding, collecting and using data is crucial to ensuring any return from your social media efforts. I would go as far as claiming that you cannot create measurable ROI without it. Why? Because the premise for social media is relevance. Users will only spend time on platforms that are relevant to them. The more time users are active, the more advertising they can be exposed to. Displaying everything to everyone will very seldom be relevant to most.
For most, the potential of social media is simply not clear, mainly because the proven ROI is not visible in their current setup.
Most companies know a lot about their customers and preferences across various contact points in the daily flow. Companies that understand how to use this data have a huge competitive advantage on social, as they can directly tap into the sweep line algorithm and ensure that they are always relevant with the content they distribute and the answers they provide to new and returning customers.
With Facebook’s recent algorithm updates, this becomes very clear. Brands that do not get content engagement, communicate with their community or know their top influencers, will be directly downgraded in reach. So, how many of your fans are engagers, website visitors or even customers? To stay relevant, we must know this and direct content based on behaviour. To give you an idea of how this can be done in a simple or even automated way, we are working with a global furniture brand that uses this strategically. Their website contains different segments of their business and, via the Facebook Pixel, they are able to track different website audiences. Whenever a campaign is going out for — let’s say — living room furniture, they direct it to everyone who has clicked this segment and exclude everyone in the audience that has converted within a fixed period. This way, they are talking directly to people who know them as a brand (have visited their website) and who have shown interest in the area this post is relevant to, but excluding the ones who have already converted. The same applies to all stages of the sales process and outlines why it is important to segment your audiences and create relevant user journeys.
2. The power of user journeys
Distributing the same content by targeting or re-targeting your current customers and ambassadors with acquisition posts while disregarding their behaviours and interests affects your relation to your community. This is where user journeys become both relevant and powerful. Having a setup where people are automatically placed in the right audience, based on their behaviour in relation to your entire brand, is where most brands really start seeing the effects of their social efforts.In relation to the example above, this means that you can easily automate the movement between audiences based on behaviour. When a customer goes from not having heard about you to engaging in a post, going to your website, becoming a fan, a newsletter subscriber or a customer, they will automatically be included in a new audience, seeing new content based on inclusions and exclusions. When furniture customers engage, they are invited to the webpage, and then to specific campaigns based on the areas they click. Then, towards conversion or retention before starting over — only with expanded and updated data from the latest flow. In relation to this, we spotted some direct similarities from social top performers in our community:
Top performers on social know:
1. their objectives
2. which KPIs to measure
3. whom they are talking to in the different stages of the sales funnel.
Doing this means that you are always using your budgets on the users that are most likely to convert to your current objectives.
Three objectives could be:
1. Get engagement (based on the best-performing posts and audiences)
2. Get clicks (establish relevance)
3. Get conversions (retention and new customers)
3. Sustainable ROI
Data activation and distribution strategy are the topics we are asked most about in our work with social media workflows. But in terms of creating lasting ROI for bigger companies on social media, there is one aspect that we cannot stress enough, and that is the effect of communication based on customer lifetime value over single conversions. The value of a returning customer, extended membership or extra sign-up is significant.
Communication based on customer lifetime value over single conversions is a key factor to sustainable ROI.
Even though there is a sweet spot for most companies starting to activate data and user journeys on social media, high social ROI correlates with social maturity: the ability to control customer flows and align your efforts with your overall business goals. To do so, we must be able to set these objectives, back them up with relevant KPIs, and control both inbound and outbound data in simple workflows controlled by our social media managers, but with direct reporting to C-level responsibles. By doing so, you can easily spot new potential, measure effects, and act on both micro and macro level.
To do so, we must be able to work with distribution and customer journeys, answer customers based on their previous engagement, and measure the effect in order to constantly display engaging content for target groups. Using a tool that combines all of these in a simple flow is what we help brands do. Coupling this with an overview of your top-50 influencers, you are pretty much covered in terms of both recent algorithm updates and proving the effectiveness of your social media efforts.
