Marketing through social media is affordable, effective and interesting. But at the same time it can be very tricky to manage, especially when you have accounts on multiple social media channels. Generally, presence on only one social media is neither advisable nor advantageous. Every business should have customer engagement strategy on various channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram etc. This is required as to have maximum reach and target audience may not necessarily be using one single social media site.
The challenge does not end there. There are newer social media sites coming up and even the existing sites are bringing in the new features to enhance customer engagement. So, the real challenge which all the businesses face is to manage the continuously evolving social media scenario and get the best ROI.
Firstly, let us understand why we need to be on multiple social media channels –
Multiple products & Service – Your business may be developing multiple products and delivering various services & solutions. Hence, you may need to have social media presence for each products on various sites and create content specifically for that particular product and site.
Various Business locations – Your business may be spread across geographies and it as multiple location. Hence for localised engagement in a particular location, you need to have different accounts for different location.
For multiple accounts you may face challenging questions like –
- How to implement a unified social media marketing strategy?
- How to maintain brand image across all the sites?
- How to keep up & develop effective engagement for our consistently growing audiences?
- How to draw out inferences from engagement?
In order to face these challenges, we need to understand certain factors –
- On which social media sites should your business have account?
To have an answer to this question, we should have a clear strategy as to:
- Why are we considering to be on social media?
- Why are we trying to increase reach?
- Why will customers engage with us?
- Is our aim to improve on customer service?
- Is our aim to improve our online reputation?
- Is our aim to build and popularise our brand?
- Are we targeting specific audience in specific geography?
- Are we considering to be on social media site just because traditional marketing is not rewarding anymore or are we trying to adopt to latest technology developments and use it for our marketing purpose?
Thus just having our presence on any social site alone will not suffice, one needs to have a clear cut strategy for the presence and be very clear as which sites is right for your business.
- How to manage various social media accounts?
Prioritize your social media accounts. If you are having multiple products, then prioritise your marketing efforts for different products and based on that place in order all your social media accounts. Prioritising can even be done on analysing which platform is more advantageous in generating outcomes, based on that ranking, a list can be prepared.
Set engagement priorities. Every social media site has its own engagement style. For an example on FB – there are 3 engagement levels – like, Comment and Share. So we should have the targets and priorities as to how many likes should we have, how many comments should we have and how many share should we have…
We should analyse that which engagement level is sharing my content with people who are not in my list.
We should also be aware of which engagement requires our immediate response.
The last but very important is to Stick to a Schedule. As consistency and regularity matters on social media engagement. A careful and strategic planning needs to be done on posting your content.
Social Media Management tools are also available which simultaneously manages all your accounts like Hootsuite and Socialbro which schedules and manages every activity on all the accounts in parallel.
Digital marketing service companies also are extremely efficient in managing your various account on different social media sites. It is highly advantageous to you as it give more time to focus on your core business.
- Measure your engagement on social media. As businesses are on social media with a purpose. It is crucial that, that purpose is met. In order to achieve it, we have to regularly monitor our efforts on how they are turning out. Are they giving us the desired directions and results? According to the measurement, we have bring some changes or add some more efforts. This is done by Social Media Analytics tools. Generally most of the sites like Facebook and Twitter provides us with these tools to analyse activities on their sites and gives us notification from time to time.
Any kind of business irrespective of its size i.e. whether it is a startup, or midsize or an enterprise, it is imperative nowadays to be active on social media. Again, only one social media account is not enough, you need to be on number of sites to attain a wider reach. Hence, it is not that simple as it sounds, it needs extra efforts to manage various accounts.
Our Yodigi – Digital Marketing Services work specifically in this area to leverage your marketing efforts by combining various digital methodologies which can increase your ROI.