Maximus Ametorgoh: Auditing the social media presence of your business
Obviously, many businesses start social media interactions with the aim of reaching their customers among the billions of users on various platforms to achieve the various social media goals they have set for the businesses. Some succeed in engaging their existing and potential customers as fans or followers on their social media accounts.
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Others feel frustrated for not getting the quality of fans or followers they wanted or paid for. The rest slowly grow the number of their fans or followers but do not sustain their engagements. They post contents and only a small percentage of their fans or followers interact with the contents.
As a result, they begin to lose faith in the platforms and the strategies they developed and deployed.
They become dismayed and do not know how to reset their social media presence to achieve their objectives. If you fall within that category of businesses, you must audit your social media presence to ensure that you have all the elements of your social media working right in order to achieve your goals. You can contract a professional to help you review your social media presence.
The 10 Ps of social media auditing
There are some factors to consider when you want to review or audit the social media presence of your business to ensure that you are doing things the right way. These include the following:
Purpose - Checking your objectives again:
When things are not working as expected on your social media accounts, you must first check if the purpose for coming on the platforms are true, achievable and measurable. You must use social media because it delivers quality number of existing and potential customers to your business via the web.
Do not choose platforms because they are popular. Select the one that has more of your customers are actively socializing on so you can be more effective there. Check if you are using the right platforms to reach your customers.
People – Defining and finding your target:
Not all your customers will be on every social media platform. It is necessary that you interact with your customers to know the platforms they are using to connect with the social network. Profile them to know their demography: their lifestyle, age, disposable income, social behavior and many other information that relate to your business.
Know their preferred social media platforms and tell them about your account so they can also join.
You can also use the target advertising functionality of some of the social media platforms to reach your target based on their stated preferences and demography. Poorly defined target will result in ineffective social media engagements.
Profile – Projecting your brand identity clearly:
Check if you have stated clearly who you are, what you do and have on offer as business. Profile your business so that your fans or followers clearly know your identity.
You must project your identity very strongly without any ambiguity. Your name, logo, profile category, profile text, website links, addresses, contacts and other profile information must be correct and true.
Do not exaggerate. Neither understate what you do or your competitive advantage. Review your profile to project your brand identity.
Plan – Working with a scheme:
You must have strategy for managing your social media accounts. The success or failure of it depends on it. So long as you have objectives to achieve, you must execute that with clearly defined strategies. Have a plan for your content development, deployment and measurement. Know when to tap into the conversations trending on social media and how you can intelligently connect with the participants and get amazing response.
Always check your plan if it is giving you the best results. Otherwise, revise or change them if they are not working for you.
Posts – Saying the right things the right way:
Be clear on what you want to say, who you want to say it to and how they want to hear it. Examine if your contents attract the right number or quality of interactions.
Find out if you are using the right formats to create your contents. Do your community of fans or followers love contents treated in text, pictures, audio or videos?
Which theme of contents do they enjoy interacting with and in which formats are those contents? Be creative with your contents.
Publish – Sharing posts at the right time:
Having your contents planned for publishing is good. But timing is better. Know when to start a conversation by publishing your contents at the time that your fans or followers are actively on social media.
High engagement is the result of sharing contents at the right time of the day. You will not get great results when you also post the wrong contents at the right time.
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Post contents that relate to the trending contexts or what your fans or followers are talking about. Audit your posts to see the ones which get high or low interactions.
Persuasion – Engaging your targets:
If you are not getting your fans or followers to rally around your contents by sharing, liking or commenting on them, then you must take a second look at your communication tone.
You must join the conversations around your contents to persuade your community of fans or followers to believe who you are and what you do as a business.
It takes persuasion to lead your fans or followers to take action or change their behavior. If that is not obvious, you will not achieve your objectives for setting up your account.
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Personnel – Getting the best team:
You need a team of competent people to work on your social media presence from contents development, broadcasting scheduling, feedback and measuring your effectiveness. If you can afford, train your team to stay ahead of the new trends and platforms of social media.
Contract an agency that understands the full scope of digital marketing, to manage your social media presence. Your team must be creative, innovative and forward-thinking. This is one area to check if your social media efforts are not delivering the expected results.
Promotions –Increasing visibility and connections:
As a business, you need to push your visibility on social media by running some campaigns and promotions to attract high attention and create more awareness. It creates some bonds (or connection) between your virtual customers and your brand or business. Dormant pages get activated or become active again after you run interesting campaigns and promotions.
If your page is inactive and boring to your fans or followers, activate some creative campaigns. Reward your fans or followers with these promotions and campaigns to keep them active on your accounts.
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Performance – Measuring value and profit:
It is salient you know how you perform on social media. You must be able to measure the returns on your investments of time and money. The ROIs every business must use to measure their effectiveness on social media are return on interactions, return on influence and return on investment. Your interactions must give your business more visibility and attention.
Through consistent interactions, you will have influence on your fans or followers. They will share more of your contents with their social network of friends to extend your reach. It will result in more sales, customers and profits. If you do not achieve these ROIs, you must audit your social media presence.
The writer is a technology consultant, digital marketing strategist,
social media expert and trainer.
WhatsApp: 0264887887