Social media marketing is still one of the newest ways to market. It is also the most powerful when you know how to use the social networks in a way that will consistently gain followers and keep them engaged. The first place to start doing this is by paying attention to the numbers. The numbers you get from running analytics tells you critical information to know such as what posts were the most popular, what kind of content is most likely to be shared and even the best times of the day for you to create posts and engage with your community.
Running analytics will help you know how many people visit each social media site each day. When you can see what site gets the most attention, you can start to review why you think that one is getting more attention than the others and apply that across the board to see if your popularity expands. For example, if 300 people visit Facebook, but only 25 visit Twitter, was it because you post more often to Facebook, or is it that you have to increase the amount of followers on Twitter? Also, if you are more active in groups at Facebook and that is why your Facebook profile gets more attention than your LinkedIn page, maybe you should join more groups on LinkedIn to increase activity there.
You will also be able to see what your most popular content and discussion topics are at any of the sites, including your own and replicate that popularity. Obviously, you don’t want to just duplicate what you are doing over and over because it was popular, but you can determine which elements made it so popular and replicate those elements.
Knowing which days and months have the highest and lowest traffic is important to know because you can find out why the traffic spikes are happening. Perhaps if you get most of your traffic around the holidays it is because you run more promotions. See if running more promotions during other months will help increase the engagement for those months as well. For retail, unless you sell children’s clothing or back to school items, August and September can be two of the slowest months of the year and that will reflect in your reports. Those might be the perfect months to run clearance specials or other sales.
When you organize your activity, posts and promotions strategically based on the information you get from analytics, you can exponentially increase followers and engagements at your social media sites. When you are also focused on increases conversion rates you could create a very successful online business. Run reports weekly or at least monthly for the best results.
