Wirral Life December 2018 | Page 86

W BUSINESS L #SOCIAL MEDIA Social Media is an incredibly powerful tool for businesses. It can be a very effective type of marketing particularly as most platforms allow a high degree of personalisation; posts designed & directed towards a defined target audience and specifically kept out of sight of unsuitable viewers. It is an easy art to learn but difficult to master. Some aficionados have built entire businesses using purely social media, but these tend to be rare exceptions. For the rest of us mere mortals, the regular companies of the world, there needs to be a proficient strategy to ensure all social media marketing is effective. In some posts, there needs to be a clear call to action, perhaps a ‘learn more’ button. It is essential that this goes to the corresponding part of the website ensuring a seamless user experience. Collaborating with partner companies, suppliers or clients can work well. It’s great to support each other. Once a campaign has been running for a while it will need optimising; is it achieving the goals, what posts performed best, how, why, when & where? From this data, we can tweak & develop the posts, evolving the plan to increase its performance & thus effectiveness. As most platforms are free to use, a common misconception is to simply throw loads of posts and adverts up & assume that they’ll work. This often has the opposite effect as people don’t want loads of ads thrust into their timelines. Quality over quantity. Finally, and most importantly, the performance of a campaign needs analysing. Has a campaign produced a decent return on investment, has it achieved the goals we set out to achieve? What worked well, what could be done even better next time? So how does a business use Social Media as an effective form of marketing? The campaigns that make us proud are those that smash objectives whilst creating positive side effects like additional brand awareness, increased shares, likes & online engagement; these are the ones which wow our clients. Social Media is simply a form of marketing. Therefore, it should demonstrably achieve a company’s goals, typically to drive traffic to their website to increase sales, raise brand awareness or perhaps aid recruitment campaigns. Once a clear objective is defined, we can start with creating some great content; something that will draw the reader in, something that’s interesting to their lifestyle, funny, provocative or simply entertaining. It must be authentic, original & well written. 86 wirrallife.com Would you like some help to develop an effective social media strategy to compliment your marketing objectives for the New Year? Please contact [email protected] and check out some of our work on our social platforms: @revolu4ion