Social media platforms offer entrepreneurs and marketers a great opportunity to boost their business and marketing capabilities by allowing them to connect directly with their audience. And yet, despite all the social media marketing tips and tricks that are freely available on the Internet, you may find it difficult to optimize your brand's social media presence.
It may bring you some relief to know you're not the only one who finds that social media can sometimes be a hard nut to crack. In fact, a recent survey conducted by DrumUp, a content curation and social media management tool, found that measuring ROI on social media marketing efforts was the biggest pain point faced by most marketers.
Based on curated lists of survey results, here are some of the key challenges faced by social media managers and how you can deal with each one of them.
Pain Point 1: ROI On Social Media
According to a survey conducted by Adobe, 52% marketers said their biggest frustration with social media marketing was the difficulty in measuring ROI. Although measuring likes, views and shares on your social media posts is indicative of engagement levels, it may not always be reflective of their impact on your business' bottom line.
There are so many metrics you could be tracking, but how do you know which ones are important for your business? The answer would depend on what you seek to achieve through social media. Are you only trying to create brand awareness, or are you aiming for improved conversions?
Jay Baer's categorization of marketing metrics is a good guide to go by. Here's how he breaks them down:
- Consumption Metrics (example: views, likes, favorites)
- Sharing Metrics (example: shares, retweets)
- Lead Generation Metrics (example: click-through-rate on social ads, clicks on lead generation cards)
- Sales Metrics (example: online sales, in-person sales)
Each of these metrics help you assess your social performance to see if it is in line with your objective.
Pain Point 2: Discovering And Curating Content For Social Media
Content curation is by far one of the most important and challenging aspects of social media management. Curating content manually is a time-consuming process, and maintaining consistency in your social media activity can also prove to be a challenge, particularly if you're strapped for time and manpower.
A worldwide survey conducted by Curata found that 76% of marketers share curated content on social media. Content curation helps you save time and effort on social media marketing. In the context of contemporary content marketing trends, automating tasks such as content curation with the use of content discovery and scheduling tools can even give you a competitive advantage.
Pain Point 3: Building A Strong Presence Across Multiple Platforms
According to Content Marketing Institute's 2014 survey, on an average, B2B businesses have 6 social accounts. Imagine the amount of content that will have to be shared to maintain an active presence on all these platforms.
While you may have seen some businesses cross-posting content on multiple platforms, the tactic is self-destructive and must be avoided. The question you need to ask yourself is, why would anybody follow you on multiple platforms if you're going to be sharing the same content on all of them?
Here's a tip. If you're using content curation tools, make sure to use a different set of keywords for each of your accounts. This will allow for some diversity in the content suggestions you receive, ensuring that your audience is exposed to fresh, interesting and unique content each time.
Pain Point 4: Participating In Conversations And Engaging With Your Audience
Not only is it important to share content on social media, you also need to engage with your audience and follow up on the content you share by way of commenting on and answering to their queries.
Ideally, you should ensure that you're just as prompt in responding to negative comments, as you are in the case of positive comments. However, 58% of a survey's respondents said that they never receive a reply from businesses after they tweet about a bad experience.
Here are a few things you can do to boost engagement with your followers on social media.
- Solicit their advice and feedback.
- Talk about trending topics and respond to any opinions they share.
- Monitor conversation threads and batch-process comments.
- Engage with active followers to build goodwill.
- Offer discounts, free coupons etc. to unhappy customers, if after assessing the situation you find that fault did lie at your end.
Even though social media marketing may pose many challenges, it can be efficiently managed by using the resources around you. A broader view of what you seek to achieve, backed by a strategy that is aligned with your goals can help you overcome these challenges with relative ease.
* Lead image adapted from juhansonin