Way back in 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web. It was the same year that the Berlin Wall came down, and we found out Milli Vanilli were lip-syncing. Five years later, in 1994, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon. Another four years after that, in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google. But it wasn’t until Facebook and the launch of the iPhone that we really began to sense the potential of online marketing. Then came the social media frenzy, with Instagram, Pinterest, Quora, Snapchat and Google+ all launching in 2010–11.
While updates and new features to these platforms are made daily, we haven’t seen a dominant player enter the marketplace since Snapchat six years ago.
So now that we all know the key players, it’s time you should evaluate your social media presence.
You need to understand where you’re spending your time, how much time you’re spending there, and most importantly, whether you’re getting a return on your investment.
What are your objectives, and are they measurable?
Is your objective to convert business directly via social? Or is it to send traffic to your website, where you can then convert business?
Whatever they might be they should be measurable.
But my social efforts are a branding exercise
It’s true that regular social media updates create familiarity, and this can help drive sales. Whether the lead came directly from social or not, social media has a role to play in your branding.
This was why most of us created a business page in the first place.
You might be making a mistake, though, to treat branding alone as the objective, while ignoring the actual data and results of your posts and tweets.
How many “likes” do you have? Look at your organic reach. For example, if you have 5000 Facebook Likes, it’s very possible that only 250 people are seeing each post.
So make sure you know how much of your time and money it will cost for 250 people to see that post. Then look at how many people like, comment and share your posts, so you can calculate how much it costs for people to engage.
Could building an email database and sending an email newsletter be more effective?
How much time and resources are you spending on each social media channel?
Take an honest look at the time and money you’re spending on each social media platform.
By identifying exactly how much of your time you spend on Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest, you can then calculate how much website traffic each hour of your time on social will drive.
So is your time spent on social media marketing worth it?
Maybe your objective for Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest is to drive traffic to your website. You should now be able to identify which social platform is more effective.
Now weigh the cost of each social platform to drive 100 visits to your website, and compare that to Google AdWords or SEO. Which is most efficient?
If you know, for instance, that your website converts 5% of all traffic, you can calculate what 100 site visits really means for you in dollars and cents. Then you’ll know the true value of your social media marketing efforts.
Quentin Aisbett, Digital Strategist, OnQ Marketing
