Quality Is Key: How To Improve Your Brand’s Social Media Streams
Today’s businesses are built on social media. Social media sites keep us connected, let companies communicate with their audience in a friendlier, less formal manner, and make sure brands are always up to date on the latest trends. As important as business social media is, though, it isn’t always as effective as it could be. Too often, because of forces like social media manipulation by bad actors, businesses find themselves working with low-quality social media data. And when the data stream is overrun with fake accounts, bots, and other accounts that interfere with quality, businesses can’t access the data they need.
If your business is going to get the most from its social media tools, the most important thing you can do is invest in higher quality data. That, in turn, will help you deliver more meaningful content – creating a communications loop in which everyone wins.
Clean Up The Mess
Poor quality data is the result of several different issues. There’s social media manipulation, as noted above, and there’s also the problem of poorly maintained in-house data systems. In one report, only about half of all businesses said that their CRM/ERP data was clean. This prevents them from fully leveraging that data in their marketing efforts, but it’s also easily remedied when businesses invest in better software or in the manual labor to clean up errors and duplications. So much about these programs is supposedly automated, that they don’t undergo a lot of maintenance, and it’s time to remedy that situation.
Learn New Approaches
Cleaning up existing data goes a long way towards improving a company’s social media performance, but it’s not the only thing that can help. By taking e-learning courses on new social media management approaches, businesses can also pull higher quality data from current social media accounts. Businesses now have access to a wide range of social media-focused courses that can help them learn cutting edge social media strategies, as well as high level data and web analytics in order to understand and communicate the impact of each campaign.
Spotlight On Results
Poor returns on your social media efforts are a clear indicator that something isn’t right with your strategy and that you need to go back to the original data set and see if there’s a problem. Unfortunately, if you’ve never had an effective social media strategy, you may not know just how much better things could be. Some simple ways that you can tell your social media strategy isn’t working is if you’re seeing a reasonable amount of traffic on your accounts but it’s not leading to conversions; you’re simply not drawing in much traffic; or you’re not earning on PPC ads. Any one of these indicates a problem, but they can all also be remedied.
Based on the ways your social media marketing efforts are falling short, you’ll want to take several different steps including and beyond cleaning up your data sets because you need both quantitative and qualitative market research. Combining all of these data points can help your company get a better sense of what content is working, which groups are responding, and where you need to focus your attention. We know that content is king, but that content needs to be rooted in a deep understanding of your audience and of how different social platforms work.
As with any project, the quality of the data and the preparatory work you put in determines the results that come out on the other side, and despite its casual appearance, social media isn’t any different. You can’t construct content on the fly or based on a vague sense of what will draw clicks. Instead, your company needs to study up and get back to the drawing board with plenty of data and lead time to develop hard hitting campaigns.
