As social media marketing becomes more important in your overall marketing strategy for your business, statistics are becoming more important to track. The current statistics show that 69% of marketers reported an increase in traffic from social media marketing efforts. With that traffic, 58% reported lead generation benefits and 40% said that sales had increased because of social media marketing campaigns. While those details don’t go into what specific social media marketing tactics were used for the best results it was brought forth that longevity, time and ongoing work is required.
What most business owners and marketers don’t understand is how much time or what specific efforts are the best practices for social media marketing. Currently over half over marketers spend six or more hours posting and engaging on their social media sites, around thirty percent spend 11 or more hours and about fifteen percent spend twenty hours or more each week. More is not always better though if you aren’t spending the right type of time.
One of the best long term strategies for social media marketing success is to set specific goals of what you want to accomplish. Just like any other sales or marketing benchmarks, creating weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly grows for what goals you want to reach is going to help you stay on track to getting there. Using social metrics to review and set reasonable objectives, and consistent monitoring of those metrics to help you determine adjustments that may need to be made is a critical part of helping you reach the growth in sales or lead generation that you would hope to get for your efforts.
Another best practice is to determine which social media networking sites are going to bring you the best returns. Healthcare businesses notoriously do better with sites such as LinkedIn or specific networking sites that appeal to the specific conditions the healthcare products and services are geared towards. Retail businesses do best on Facebook and hobby, home and garden or other specific networking sites that appeal to those who are most likely to be interested in those retail products.
When you have goals, consistently measure in order to make adjustments and target the social media sites that are going to give you the best return, you have a much higher chance of social media marketing success than if you approach it eclectically. How much time you decide to spend at each site is up to you and what you find the best success rate dictates for your objectives.
