Your social media campaign may be chugging along at a steady pace. You may have won new fans and followers, but isn’t there a chance that you could do a lot better?
One crucial factor to consider while improving your social media campaign is to understand the needs of your target audience. You need to provide effective solutions to those needs, monitor your campaign after implementing changes, and further fine-tune your strategy for optimum results.
You may have been both surprised and pleased when you walk into your regular restaurant and notice that the steward not only remembers your name, but also your favorite dish. In the same way, you too need to find out the exact needs of your target market by observing how they interact with you on social media channels.
You need to study their reviews and comments, and monitor their likes, tweets, or other forms of communication that they may have posted. If your audience is not very interactive then you need to take adequate steps to encourage them to begin posting their views. Furthermore, you need to keep track of what social media sites they prefer, the content that they like to see and comment, and the time of day or night that they prefer to visit.
Your social media campaign should include several avenues to ensure that your friends, fans, and followers remain engaged on a continual basis. You need to share images, videos, stories, links, news, and even slide shares with your audience to retain their interest and evoke responses. You must also respond instantly to comments or reviews posted by your audience.
You need to plan, implement, and monitor your social media campaign as well as merge it with your marketing plan. You basically need a social media calendar that helps you monitor your strategy. Tools such as Hubspot can even allow you to feed in the date as well as time that you plan to upload articles for specific social media sites. Other tools such as Sprout Social, SocialOomph, and HootSuite should also be explored to implement your planned strategy.
Finally, you need to listen to your target audience and respond in a mature and pleasant manner. There may be a lot of positive or negative comments, but it is the way you respond that will win you a lot more friends, fans, and followers, or could lead them to abandon you forever.
Deleting negative comments or ignoring them will only lead to increased anger and encourage more negative comments even from passive followers. You need to pacify angry fans, solve their issues, and convert negative comments into positive ones.
You must make it a point to devise a chart that indicates the exact level of information that you possess about your target audience on all of the above pointers. The range should start from nothing, a little knowledge, moderate, and everything that is to know about your customers.
This chart should be revisited every few months of implementing your revised strategy to comprehend if you have indeed learnt a lot more about them during your revised social media campaign. This technique will help you monitor and improve your social media campaign on a regular basis.