To effectively build an online business, a social media presence is no longer a luxury but rather a necessity. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are three good places to start. Setting up profiles on these platforms is a simple process, although one caveat is that accessing Facebook or other overseas social media pages in countries like China (I have done marketing for Chinese companies for many years) require the use of a proxy server or VPN, details of these are beyond the scope of this article.
I’m a huge advocate of the Pareto principle or the 80:20 rule, in which 80% of your results will come from 20% of your work. Simple data analysis can quickly tell where this 80% or so of results is coming from. It’s essential to know exactly what metrics to look at and avoid falling into the trap of measuring vanity metrics like link clicks or website visits. This means analysing the data that drives your business forward in a real tangible way; look at bottom line results like revenue, retention and lifetime value. Avoiding vanity metrics for actionable metrics or what I call inner beauty allows you to continually optimise what you do online thus allowing for the best return for time and money spent. Social media strategies should always be approached in this way, find what platforms work and build from there. Don’t just try a shotgun approach of spending equal time and money in all areas, instead be like a sniper and hit your targets without waste or collateral damage to your finances.
Strategy: How to Post
More often than not Facebook will be your trump card and thus the social media platform where you should spend 80% of your time and money. That’s not to say that other platforms should be ignored or that Facebook is always going to be the best place to build an online presence, but once you find the areas your business perform best in it’s highly advisable to decrease time spent on other platforms and either increase time spent on this optimal platform or spend time testing new platforms. To reduce time spent on other platforms without losing all or ideally any traffic, businesses should seek to either fully or semi automate. Semi automation is always the better option as software is simply not advanced enough to choose and post content or reply to customer concerns and queries at a human level. There are many tools for automating social media management such as Hootsuite, Buffer and Agora Pulse. I’ve tried many and always find myself gravitating back to Hootsuite, it’s very user friendly and feature packed. Typically, I use Hootsuite to post to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+ and use IFTTT to automate sharing to other platforms like Pinterest, Tumblr etc. This allows for one post being shared across six or more platforms automatically.
Using Hootsuite you can not only post on many different social media platforms at once, but also schedule posts, scan the web for content to post and analyse post metrics. Analysing post metrics allows you to find the most effective type of content to post to your audience and thus allows you to further optimise your time on social media. In the same way you should find the social media platform that brings you the highest value, you should find the content type that brings the highest engagement. Content that isn’t bringing results should be reduced or eliminated, whereas content with high engagement should be increased. As with everything online, new content types should continually be tested to see if you can find any hidden gems in terms of content that gets your audience engaged.
What to Post
Social media platforms are not ecommerce websites and shouldn’t be treated as such. If you continually post promotional content, the highest engagement you’re likely to see is clicks on your profile’s unfollow button. I also like to follow the Pareto Principle when posting, in that 20% of the content is promotional and 80% is non promotional but still of interest to my target audience. Experiment to see what content works with your target audience, as well as what times and how often you should post to get the highest engagement from your audience. Generally Twitter engagement is lower than Facebook or Instagram so you can post here more frequently. I usually find posting once a day on Facebook and Instagram and three or more times on Twitter works well. If posting this frequently on Twitter seems like a daunting task, you can use Hootsuite’s content curation tool to find relevant content online. Posting some content from another website is fine and can actually help make you (and your business) look like an expert in your particular field. The goal is to become the source of the important information your audience seeks, this should be done through your own content but can also include content from other sources. Remember to keep track of post metrics on all platforms. If you have a post that performs well on Twitter but hasn’t been posted on Facebook, then it’s probably worth reposting on Facebook or any other relevant platform.
When to Promote
Content with high engagement after posting can often be worth spending some money on to promote to a larger audience, especially if it’s promotional content. Facebook, Twitter etc. have become popular because of positive user experience, however paid advertising is often not considered a positive experience for the user. To help combat this Facebook ads have a relevance score and Twitter a Quality Adjusted Score, both are essentially metrics of how positive and relevant the ad was to the audience it was shown to. Everything else being equal, if these scores are high the ad can reach a much higher audience than if the scores are low, meaning a lot more value for money. When promoting posts, look for content with a high volume of positive feedback such as shares (or retweets), likes and positive comments and a low volume of negative feedback such as post hides, spam reports, unlikes of page and negative comments. Of course these are vanity metrics but they are metrics that show signs your audience appreciates the content. Again, don’t just promote content with good vanity metrics but rather within this content, look for the post with inner beauty; what has increased your sales or improved your follower base (followers can be converted to customers later).
Posting free content and then promoting in this way can be a very powerful marketing strategy. For example; if a free post with a reach of 1,000 views has brought in 10 sales at $10 profit per sale and boosting for $10 has a potential reach of 5,000, then statistically speaking you could earn $500 for a spend of $10. You might be thinking that the free post has been viewed by an audience already familiar with and hopefully a big fan of your brand, so this calculation is flawed, but also know that you can boost to your own Fan base. The reason is simple, not all of your Fans will see your content. This is due to the platform’s algorithms; Facebook posts will be displayed on the timelines of less than 10% of your Fan base, so promoting this to your fan base alone will allow for a lot more exposure and hopefully a lot more money in your bank account.
