Monitor and Test for Social Media Networking Success – 5 Tips

Do You Monitor and Test Your Social Medial Marketing Strategies? (If not, uh oh)

In a recent e-class I instruct on Inbound Marketing, a student was a bit discouraged because her social media efforts weren’t working.

She was trying to drive traffic to her website through a particular network, but the traffic hasn’t shown up.

This is a common complaint. But, not everything will work for everybody.

The first thing to do get moving in the right direction is to analysis your efforts.

To do this, here are five questions to ask yourself:

1. When are you posting?
2. How often are you posting?
3. Are you using ‘targeted’ posts the majority of the time?
4. Do you engage with other users: share, retweet, favorite, like others’ posts?
5. Do you monitor your efforts and revise accordingly?

Take a step back and focus on the questions above.

Let’s go over each one.

1. Try posting at different times than you usually do.

If you’re posting in the morning, switch to the afternoon. Posting at night? Switch to the morning. You get the idea. You might also mix it up.

2. Figure out how many times you post to a particular network each day.

With social networks, your posts aren’t seen by most of your followers. The networks only allow a very small percentage of your posts to make it through to a small amount of your followers. This is just the way it is.

This means you really do need to post more often.

I now tweet 11 to 13 times a day on Twitter. This is throughout a 24 hour period. I also Retweet around 10 tweets of other users. And, I share articles I read that I think my Twitter followers would be interested in.

For my own tweets, I don’t repeat the same post for at least 24 to 48 hours, unless it’s promotional. And, even those posts I try to keep about 24 hours apart.

Now, this may or may not be a good idea.

Why?

Well, since I post unique posts throughout a 24 to 48 hour time period, a huge amount of my followers are likely not to see a particular post. If I posted the same post four times throughout a 24 hour period, it’s much more likely to be seen by more people.

Writing this, I can see I have to test this. But, back to the post at hand.

3. Keep your posts on target.

This simply means to post content that is relevant to your targeted audience.

I see so many social network users who list a particular niche in their bio, but post about everything under the sun.

This diminishes that person’s authority and professionalism, at least to me.

If you write about health, keep your post related to the health arena. If you write about social media marketing, keep your posts focused on that arena. And, offer valuable content in each post. Your followers followed you because of what they thought they’d be getting from you. Don’t let them down.

Also, if you’re including promotional posts, try to keep it 90% quality content for the reader and 10% promotional content.

4. Engagement is key.

It’s a must to share, pin, favorite, retweet, and so on, the posts of others. If you’re helpful to others, they’ll take notice and reciprocate.

This back and forth, this engagement is what the social media search engines pick up on. They call it ‘social’ for a reason.

5. Monitor your marketing actions, including your social media efforts.

This is soooooo important. It’d be a huge waste of time, effort, and sometimes money to keep doing the same things if those efforts aren’t working.

You need to monitor what you’re doing. Check to see if you’re getting traffic, leads, clients, or other benefits from the efforts you put into your social media marketing. If you don’t see results with one strategy or network, try another.

Most of the networks have analytical tools you can use to help keep on top of things.

Final tip: Make your bio work for you. Let the visitor to your profile know exactly who you are and what they can get from you. Be specific . . . and focused.

If you’re an author of children’s books, that should be in your bio. If you’re a health writer, that should be in your bio. If you’re an inbound marketing, that should be in your bio. Just be sure to keep it focused.

I’ve been on profiles that list about 10 different things from wine connoisseur to sports enthusiast. While this is fine if you’re on social networks to socialize, it’s not fine if you’re trying to bring traffic back to your focused website and to find targeted leads.

Bottom line is you’re not alone. Everyone who is marketing, whether the big company or the individual, has to monitor their actions and results. And, each social network isn’t a one-size-fits-all. It takes testing to find what works. It also takes perseverance.

About the Author

Karen Cioffi is an award-winning author, content writer and inbound marketer. Her site, The Article Writing Doctor, offers lots of helpful tools for your inbound marketing endeavors and content writing services if you prefer outsourcing.