In an age where some of the recent updates to the Oxford dictionary include “awesomesauce,” “srsly,” and “hangry,” it’s easy to see how social media has played a huge influence on how we express ourselves. In fact, Facebook reports that around 4.5 billion likes are generated daily. These “likes” provide insight into our thoughts and expressions (even more now with Facebook’s new like buttons). Understanding what your social media engagement is telling you results in better customer journeys with your brand.
Not all likes are created equal
Worldwide, ad spending on social media was estimated at nearly $24 billion last year. But do you know the actual value of your individual social media followers? How are you determining which of these followers are your most valuable? Is engagement on one social media platform indicative of a more engaged prospect than on another platform?
Answering these questions and making the connections between your followers on all your marketing platforms results in a holistic view of brand engagement. This can connect the dots between social media, emails, and advertising to see the whole story of the customer journey. Right On Interactive’s Customer Lifecycle Marketing solution allows you to identify engagement across platforms and score on what matters most to your company.
Deeper insight into your prospects and customers helps determine which personas are being targeted through social media engagement. It’s important to think like the customer when producing content, and this is especially true for a social presence. Social media is not about dumping as much information about your company online as possible. It’s about a two-way conversation between your thought leadership and industry solutions to provide the content that your personas are interested in.
With this in mind, focus on your personas not just in your content, but in where you are distributing it. With new social media channels being created so frequently, it’s easy to think the new platform is the new place-to-be. While it might be easy to get caught up in new flashy sites, it’s important to be where your personas want you to be- whether that’s new and flashy or tried and true.
Quality over quantity
“Within the industry now, there’s a strong belief that what you really want is a passionate audience, even if it’s slightly smaller, versus a larger, meh audience,” says social media analyst Alan Wolk.
It can be tempting to use social media to simply drive up your numbers, but having lots of followers isn’t necessarily a good thing anymore. Having a large, unengaged pool of followers doesn’t help further your brand. The goal is to grow a passionate audience that’s engaged and valuable to your brand, through their retweets, comments, likes, etc.
Similarly, it’s just as much of a loss if you develop a strong pool of followers, but don’t do anything with them. Engagement with all of your followers is important at every stage of their lifecycle journey with your brand. It allows you to segment, nurture, and promote based on persona and interest.
Social media engagement is the new crystal ball
Maybe robots haven’t taken over yet, but social media sure has. For the first time in history, personal data has been gathered for half of the world’s population via social media.
This much data allows for a level of predictive analysis that we’ve never encountered before. Small variances in patterns of behavior among millions of people allows for identifying many different traits. This data knows us even better than we know ourselves sometimes, as evident by Target sending a baby coupon flyer to a 15-year old 2 weeks before she even told her parents she was pregnant.
Facebook likes can also be used as predictive data. Liking a page about curly fries has been known to predict to a high level of intelligence. Similarly, you can use trends in your social media engagement to predict which leads will turn into qualified leads, and how many more social media touches a customer needs to become a raving fan.
Social media is only going to keep expanding. Understanding how engagement through the various channels affects your customer journey and interactions with your brand allows you to win, keep, and grow your customer-base.
