Follow Friday: Part 1

Follow Friday: Part 1: Better Social Marketing

June 29th, 2012 - In our first ever Follow Friday blog post, I want to share an article from the great folks at iMedia Connection! This article will be a 6 part series on better social media marketing.

Enjoy!

1. The best social benchmarks are your own

The rise in social media marketing has launched a thousand social media dashboards. Nonetheless, the industry still lacks the benchmarks, indexes, or norms that most other media channels have.

Brands often waste time waiting for a dashboard to package their social metrics, rather than doing an hour or two of hard work to learn what fuels performance for their brand, product, or service.

Truth be told, most brands probably don't need fancy social dashboards. If you want to monitor social performance, start by looking at your own page data and consumer interactions, and then compare what you're doing week over week, month over month, season over season.

Try to identify trends and highlight the days when your posts garner the most interaction. Little things like this provide greater visibility into which content you should be creating or curating. You might find that posts aimed at moms, for example, perform really well on Wednesday mornings -- and that you should forget about reaching them on Sundays and Mondays.

I see too many brands celebrating Facebook victories, whether that's fan growth or interaction spikes, without understanding what sparked the victories. The constant testing of hypotheses will uncover which of your posting, pinning, and tweeting strategies work best, enabling you to repeat that success.

Brevity is the key to comedy, and it's key to social performance as well. Short posts, tweets, videos, or something as simple as a picture tend to connect with your audience and amplify your brand best. By monitoring how these actions perform, you can learn the appropriate word count or video length for future posts.

Thanks for reading!

I am also tweeting news daily from @everlastlight and @kyle_leighton .

Come back next Friday for Part 2!

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