Social media marketing has steadily made the transition from a ‘nice to have’, to marketing necessity for business. The chances are that the company you’re working for is utilising social media marketing in one way or another. But how do we measure success? Do we simply refer to account metrics including Facebook Likes, Twitter Followers, and Google +1’s? At Avenue Digital, we prefer to dig deeper and investigate brand engagement and hard statistics including traffic generation, sales and ROI. At the core of any social media marketing campaign that drives growth is content. Content that is curated to be shared, encourages the most influential and relevant accounts to engage with brands.
How Do We Measure Social Media Engagement?
There are a plethora of social media influence tools on the market including, PeerIndex, Klout and Kred to enable brands to benchmark engagement. Each tool measures engagement with different algorithms, much like comparing Bing to Google, however they share commonalities with a focus on the type of accounts connecting with your brand and frequencies of connections.
When measuring the success of brand engagement, it is crucial to track the amount of unique accounts that connect to your social media channels. Advocate strategy is fundamental to encourage loyal people to connect time-after-time, however there should be a focus on engaging as much of your target audiences on social media as possible.
Being Visual
Avenue Digital's social media clients approach us for underlying social media strategy, with a focus on market analysis and content strategy to encourage as much engagement on social media with target audiences. Placed at the core of our content strategy is a focus on visually appealing brand imagery of product/service offerings and participation from users, executed across the channels including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram.
People like visually appealing content, so much so that tweets with image links get twice as much engagement as those without. This practice can be applied to all social media networks and Avenue Digital place social media image creation as a priority for clients. The creative team work closely with the social media team to ensure that posts are appealing and an extension to clients brands.
Right Time, Right Network
Timing is crucial for engagement on social media. It is tempting to share content as soon as it’s ready, but results show that posting a peak activity times can provide you with significantly higher click through rates. With this said, Avenue Digital recommend posting at peak times that suits your community rather than general peak activity times. Below we have analysed the prime activity times for all followers of @avenue_digital
Investigating your communities can be fascinating. Our results show that perhaps followers of Avenue Digital like hopping on Twitter from 10am and tend to wind down at 5pm in the evening. We would therefore publish content within this period to ensure maximum potential for engagement.
Final Thoughts from James
When devising your social media content strategy, it is vital that you have your target audience in mind and publish content that is going to excite them to want to visit your restaurant, buy your products and/or use your services. Be visual, time well and champion your company with more engaging social media content.
Are you looking to create engaging content on social media? Talk to us…
