Posted by Having a reliable social media tracking scheme could make all the difference in your marketing process. The ads you post on social networks will yield better results when you have complete access to key metrics such as brand awareness, engagement, reputation, and conversion.
Unfortunately, businesses face many challenges that limit the effectiveness of their tracking methods on social platforms. Once you take down these barriers, you’ll discover how the results of your monitoring strategy are more useful than you imagined.
We bring you 5 challenges and solutions to improve social media monitoring strategy
Challenge 1: Fake and Inactive Followers
When keeping an eye on social media stats and metrics, it feels convenient to concentrate on numbers and lose sight of what matters. Tracking the wrong numbers will paint an inaccurate picture of your strategy’s status and results. These numbers are called vanity metrics because anyone can fake them with the right amount of money. They include:
- Followers
- Likes
- Page checks
- Video views
- Downloads
Vanity metrics look good on paper. Some might even serve to boost your credibility. However, they don’t give reliable insights into how well a profile can grow your brand.
Bots are everywhere nowadays
Fake social media profiles are on the rise. Reports from Mediakik show that an estimated 95 million bot accounts are on Instagram. These bots are useless because they don’t produce actionable metrics like repeat views, social mention, conversion stats, or content shares.
Solutions
While hiring an influencer could propel your brand forward, it’s crucial to choose correctly. Before hiring an influencer to represent your company, ensure they generate actionable metrics. A report from Points North exposed how a certain cosmetics company wasted $600,000 on nonexistent impressions and influencer profiles having fake followers. This loss is a clear example of how dangerous bot accounts can be to businesses.
A complete social media profile audit will give you genuine info and boost your monitoring efforts.
Steps for Auditing Social Media Profiles
- Carefully review the platforms you need for your campaign – Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok.
- Check the important metrics of each profile such as engagement, link clicks, mentions, impressions, referral traffic, and sharing stats.
- Check the posts that performed the best and categorize them as images, promotional, videos, informative, educative, etc.
- Create a spreadsheet and arrange all posts according to their performance. Feel free to customize it to show the information you need.
Perhaps the most vital test you can run is to calculate the individual’s engagement rate to determine if they are capable of representing your brand.
Challenge 2: Difficulty Determining ROI
A report by Webbiquity shows that 46% of B2B marketers are unsure about whether or not their socials have generated revenue. ROI-monitoring remains a problem for companies that advertise via social networks. Unlike with typical marketing, it’s difficult to see how much profits you’re generating from the time and resources you spend on social media marketing.
Solutions
There may be no obvious way of telling how much of your engagements will lead to sales, but you can get a pretty good idea by following the steps below.
- Define your set goals
Every strategy you create must have its goals. The first step is deciding which metrics will typically affect your sales. The metrics must be quantifiable and their measurements easy to automate. Examples are downloads, mailing list sign-ups, and website visits.
- Plan your campaign according to your set goals
Your campaign should strictly align with the goals you have set. Using a call to action that directs your audience to act according to your goals is vital here. For example, you could ask them to subscribe to your newsletter at the end of every post.
- Convert Goals to Potential Earnings
Conduct research on how these activities typically affect your sales beforehand. For example, you could have a record of how many sales you make per 100 new subscribers. This way, if your campaign turns out 300 new subscribers, you can estimate the number of new sales you made from it.
- Get Quality Tracking Tools
Keep track of your goals with paid or free social media monitoring tools such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social. They’re fully automated and will make the process a lot easier for you.
- Record Social Media Expenses
Keep a record of all your expenses so that you can eventually calculate to see if you have a positive or negative ROI. These expenses should include ad costs, time, influencer costs, and price of subscriptions to social media monitoring software.
- Calculate your percentage profits
Tabulate your earnings from the social media campaign and subtract all the expenses from it. The percentage profit is your social media ROI.
Following the steps above will help you to discover your ROI and improve social media monitoring. Like with any investment, having a clear estimate of your social media campaign returns will help you to decide if it’s worth it or not.
Challenge 3: Incompatible Social Media Platforms
Your target audience may be less active on certain platforms than others. Hence, you can’t interpret engagement numbers the same way on all platforms.
For example, according to a study by AP NORC, 76% of teens in the US use Instagram while less than 30% use LinkedIn. The unevenness of audiences in social media platforms has led oblivious business owners to change marketing strategies in vain.
For instance, although both networks are similar, Tiktok and Instagram have different predominant demographics.
Solutions
Knowing your target audience is a significant first step to improve social media monitoring. It gives you a better estimate of what constitutes a successful campaign on a particular platform.
Know Your Audience
You need to start by finding out what social media platform your audience uses the most and an excellent way to pull this off is with surveys. You could use Google Forms to ask questions like “What is your favourite social media site?” or “Which people do you follow?”
Listen with Online Tools
You can use social media analytics tools to determine the predominant demographic of your audience on each social media platform. Social media monitoring software like Sprout Social, for instance, has an advanced listening tool to gather info such as age, location, gender, and device usage.
Success is Relative
A seemingly average campaign may be faring better than you think if you consider the predominant demographic using the network. Always determine ad effectiveness based on the platform in question. For instance, if you advertise products for teens, don’t expect your engagements on LinkedIn to be anywhere as high as that of Instagram.
Challenge 4: Difficulty Tracking Results Early On
According to Wearearise, it typically takes about 6-9 months to see meaningful results from a social media strategy. When results don’t come immediately after launching a campaign, many business owners pull the plug on it. They struggle to grasp the key concepts of how to do social media monitoring effectively and end up focusing on making money on the get-go.
Solutions
Don’t expect immediate sales
The key to making sales with social media marketing is building good customer relationships, and this takes time to achieve.
Focus more on the long term
You need time to build trust. The level of trust you need to make a sale depends on your product and its price. Typically, the more expensive an item, the more time people need to decide on whether or not to buy it. Spending a few hundred bucks on a shoe feels a lot safer than spending thousands on a luxury watch.
Focus on meaningful metrics
Before your campaign starts to generate sales, you can track its effectiveness by monitoring metrics that indicate a growing interest in your product. These metrics include the number of comments, website traffic, and subscriptions. There are social media monitoring companies that could help you track them easily.
Challenge 5: Difference Between Online Popularity and Reputation
Brand reputation is just as important as popularity, if not more. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to quantify popularity than it is to quantify reputation. It’s difficult to know what your audience thinks about your brand because of these factors:
- Lack of honest feedback
- Difficulty in converting opinions and feelings to numbers
- Abuse of online reviews
It doesn’t help that most paid or free social media monitoring tools don’t make provisions to help brands monitor their public reputation.
Solutions
Get a social media manager to monitor and respond to comments regularly
Improve social media monitoring by hiring a social media manager that will handle interactions full time and provide regular reports.
Monitor your mentions and custom hashtags
Active monitoring of every social mention and custom hashtag can give sentiment analysis of your brand’s audience perceptions. This strategy helped Arby’s to develop brilliant new ideas like their “Saucepocalypse” ad campaign and Meat Mountain sandwich.
Conduct surveys and polls about your brand
The most effective way to understand your brand perception is by directly asking your customers. Get honest feedback about their experiences with your product or service.
Get Your Audiences to Participate in Your Online Poll via SMS
The more participants you have, the more accurate your poll results will be. To get more participants, encourage your audience to participate via SMS. Creating an SMS poll is the fastest and easiest way to find out what they think.
These solutions would give you better insights into your consumers’ needs and mindset. You’ll have the tools to increase your returns and grow your business. Excellent social media monitoring strategy helped Cisco attain an astronomical 281% ROI. It’s the lifeblood of several other businesses today and there’s a constant need for enhancements.
You too can enjoy more success if you solve the problems affecting your social media monitoring strategy. Apply the newly-improved metrics to your marketing campaigns and you should see a boost in social media engagement and sales conversion.
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