How do we measure business success from likes, shares and comments? Is real business value generated by the positive footprint your brand is creating instead of simply the return on marketing investment (ROMI)? And, do we even need social media for our business? I’ll discuss these points as well as the impact social media can have for new online businesses who are struggling to make an impact through organic search.
A lot of people these days, rightly or wrongly, highly value likes, shares and even various emoji responses to their social posts.
Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest, it really doesn’t matter. The more engagement we receive the more confident we are in the content or posts we’ve sent out.
Let’s face it, people haven’t changed. We still require positive reinforcement to make us feel good and confident about the actions we’ve taken. The only thing that has changed for modern marketers is the arena.
It’s now become part and parcel of if you’re going to start a company, you need to have social media accounts.
Why is this the case?
Frequently new businesses open social media accounts and have no idea what they plan on doing with them, who will manage them or even how to support business aims with them.
It’s a pretty common scenario.
It’s even more common to encounter businesses who fail to understand how simply the growth of followers and engagement (e.g. likes, shares and comments) is driving value to their business.
This misunderstanding leads to fundamental misconceptions of how best to set up and use social media channels to support your business.
Another question worth answering is how does social media support your business’s SEO strategy?
More often than not businesses will separate search marketing from social media, which to greater and lesser extents, can really negatively impact your business results.
I’ll answer all of these questions and more across the following sections:
- What is the Purpose of Social Media?
- Does Your Company Need Social Media Accounts?
- How Does Social Media Engagement Drive Business Value?
- How Does Social Media Support an SEO Strategy?
What is the Purpose of Social Media?
Believe it or not social media is not just a place to share the latest funny cat video or watch Trump attempt to write a coherent point on twitter.
I know, shocker right?
The real purpose of social media for businesses is about developing and building your brands presence, awareness, personality, positioning and visibility across a wider spectrum of customers.
I won’t condescend to you about the rapidity of change and the speed of communication in the 21st century, but it’s worth grasping the purpose of social media for businesses or you will either miss a great opportunity or shoot yourself in the foot at some point.
Now, here’s where businesses go wrong.
Many of them (especially ecommerce) focus their communications on heavy product and service pushing, quoting endlessly about value propositions and their latest offers and discounts.
If you’re employing this strategy – stop, it’s the complete wrong direction.
Think of social media instead as a party.
If you went to a party and started your car salesman chat to people, they would likely ignore you, go and hang around with somebody else or just lock you in the cloakroom.
However, if you entered the party and talked about some interesting stories, shared some insightful tips, excited people and kept them interested with what you have to say, then bingo – you’re out of the cloakroom and now the centre of attention.
Now before you start creating some virtual punch bowl, the point is this – social media should be used as an extension of your business’s personality, and the value from that is a highly engaged growing audience who want to learn more about you and your business.
Instead of mindlessly sharing endless product pushes and promotions, ask yourself would I engage with that?
If the answer is no, don’t do it.
The algorithms themselves reward people and businesses who drive engagement. Likes, shares and comments are exactly the kind of social media capital you want to start generating.
The more you share great content, give insightful opinions, support queries, share interesting news and cultivate a non-robotic personality that is the staple personification of your company voice, then your brand will start to establish a much bigger presence than it did before.
Your business will see the value generated through a number of different channels over time as well as direct social media advertising (we’ll come onto this in the next section).
This makes it hard for the number crunchers in your business to measure a tangible return. However, when it comes to digital marketing this is the new norm.
No longer can we accurately confirm the priority of each customer touchpoint in terms of its relative return for your business with 100% conviction. Don’t get too bogged down in attribution modelling at this stage.
It’s now more important to understand the correlatory impact of using wider channels such as social media and advertising to see the overall pie of your business growing.
My final message here is much like my points with SEO – focus your social media efforts for people not just for algorithms.
The clever way is understanding that the algorithms reward engagement with greater visibility, and engagement comes from being interesting. It’s the classic chicken and egg online story.
Does Your Company Need Social Media Accounts?
Here’s the simple answer – yes!
The impact social media can have on your business and brand depends on how much time and effort you spend in aligning your social media strategy to your wider brand strategy.
Now what do I mean by this?
Well, in essence you should always see social media as a way to enhance your brand’s visibility and appeal to a wider group of customers.
This is no different to an overarching brand strategy which should include everything from PR and advertising to product creation and customer care.
Social media are simply additional powerful channels to integrate into your strategy.
For instance, let’s take the example of a new drinks company.
If you’re planning on cultivating a new brand, you’ll want to map out your brand’s positioning, personality, awareness, attributes, competitive advantage and target market amongst a multitude of other aspects.
This should all come to form a brand strategy.
Now, say you’re looking at how to portray your new brand to your desired target market – an adventurous young male UK-based audience.
You’ll want to identify key messaging for your drinks company, your principles, who and what you’re associated with to drive the brand attribute of adventurous as well as mapping out your audiences major touchpoints.
As part of this analysis you identify that your target market’s major source of information is Facebook and Instagram.
As a result, the power of your messaging, positioning and major influence on your brand’s success is how you cultivate your community on these platforms and drive desire, interest and engagement to increase the visibility of your new adventurous associated youth drink.
Now, we could go into war and peace regarding a full brand strategy on this, so I’ll stop there. The message is simple, social media is a great attribute to rapidly increase your brand’s exposure, cultivate a highly targeted and engaged community and increase your prospect base at much lower cost than straightforward advertising.
Social media advertising, however, is a whole other kettle of fish.
Facebook in particular gives you an incredible range and depth for targeting options which you can use to get the right eyes on your brand messages, content and even product or service offerings (here it’s acceptable) very quickly and effectively.
This is possible due to the ridiculous amount of data Facebook has on all it’s users.
For instance, it knows what you like, what you watch, where you’ve checked in/added a photo, groups you’re interested in, gender, age, job, core friends, consumer habits, political opinions etc.
Yes, it’s super creepy, but for marketers this level of advertising specificity is only going in one direction so you’d be daft not to use it!
The cost, as with all advertising, is set by your own particular budget constraints and the level of sophistication you implore is up to you.
As an example, with the right simple set up you can have a visitor to your site, who will then receive a branded ad when they next visit Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn. The more they engage with your ads, the more retargeted brand or product ads they will receive.
This comes by taking advantage of the various social media channel pixels and applying them to your site. It’s free to do and will hugely support effective social media marketing, as well providing you with extra data to improve the level and volume of user conversions.
Thus with the correct setup and understanding of your customers habits, the more you can automatically set up complex user journeys that will both develop and expand your brand’s presence and drive baseline customer value for your business.
If you haven’t got any social media accounts, go and sign up now.
How Does Social Media Engagement Drive Business Value?
Let me break this section down a little further.
Frequently in this position businesses get overly confused between paid social media advertising and organic posts.
As mentioned previously, we often opt our minds here to advertising as it’s much easier for businesses to comprehend the value of a given input – e.g. if I spend X I will get Y in return from social media activity.
However, like everything in digital marketing, it’s not that straight forward.
Paid Social Media Advertising
As mentioned, it’s usually very hard to clearly show a direct and obvious connection between social media and business value.
Even when it comes to advertising, attributed value is often a debate between how different platforms measure an attributed conversion.
For instance, a common conversion attribution from Facebook is ‘View- through’.
This basically means that if a user saw your ad within a specified period of time (e.g. 30 days) and then at some point went to purchase a product or service on your website/completed another conversion (the Facebook pixel if configured correctly will be able to pick this up), it will attribute a sale as a result of the ad.
However, Google Analytics can often have a contrasting opinion.
Google Analytics will, as standard, usually implore the ‘last interaction attribution model’.
This basically means they will attribute the conversion to the last source the user came through (e.g. social media, organic search, paid search, email, referral).
You can play around with these models to get a picture that you’re more happy with the look of (marketers will frequently do this to justify their spend). However, the point is this – online purchases are multifaceted. Influencing a user to convert will likely involve multiple sources within your marketing strategy (e.g. social media, email, organic search, Google Ads etc) and so correlation comparisons are usually great ways to understand the snapshot value of activities you use.
I’m not saying Facebook, Google Analytics or both are wrong, but they are trying to overly simplify what are very complex user journeys.
It’s far better to have all your sources and tracking pixels set up to measure traffic acquisition channel effectiveness, conversions and your overall ROMI vs without/less marketing spend.
This helps you to instead create an ecosystem of online touch points which you should regularly monitor to drive overall ROMI.
Organic Social Media
Organic social media marketing, however, is completely different.
It’s fantastic to have the ability to pay and promote posts and products; widening your net and driving more obvious conversions.
However, in reality the power of your brand will come from your day-to-day ability to build an audience, offer interesting content and engage with your users.
Now, finance-minded people will hate this.
For instance, if you can’t measure a clear and obvious return from the effort you are putting in, why bother doing it?
This is the wrong mentality. It’s narrow-minded and massively misses the less immediate tangible benefits of frequent prospect and customer engagement and the long-term potential benefits to your brand.
Think of it as a friendship. You don’t neglect your friends nor do you stop speaking to them because there is no immediate and obvious benefit to you.
Instead, you regularly engage with them, you talk about the things you’re both interested in and you put in the effort to be fun and supportive where needed.
Over the course of a long-term friendship this creates a strong connection, trust, an understanding and appreciation that frequently leads to building more of these types of friendships with others as well.
Organic social media is no different.
First you want to understand your users or the types of users you want to attract. Then you want to engage with them in a way that both boosts your brands visibility and drives interest.
The more regularly you engage in this non-abrasive mentality of building and sustaining strong relationships, engagement will follow.
Now, as mentioned in the above advertising section, to measure the value of social media engagement you really should be looking at the impact from the correlation (e.g. the impact of carrying out each activity than without).
With organic social media you should also be looking to measure the impact it has on the size of your audience and the wider perception of your brand.
Think of it this way – creating product adverts takes a day, building a successful brand takes years.
Branding is often a core competency for businesses, particularly those with competitors offering similar alternatives.
Building brand awareness, a strong brand story, demonstrating your brand personality and associating your brand with key messages and meanings (e.g. adventure) is what can really set you apart from your rivals.
Outdoor clothes brands are a great example here.
Realistically the product quality differences between Trespass and North Face are quite small, but their cultivated brands are completely different.
Whereas Trespass positions itself as cost effective, North Face positions itself as premium.
Though there are some differences in the products, it’s majorly the brand that distinguishes them.
Based on your own desires and personality are you more interested in buying the best bang for your buck or would you rather be associated with adventure, Buzz Aldrin ads, great explorers and standing on top of Mount Everest?
Social Media is a great way to position your brand and is one of the most powerful modern strands of brand building.
Over time successful brands lead to strong conversions, poor and inconsistent brands do not.
There is value to an effective, focused and consistent set of social media communications, promotions and engagement.
How does Social Media Support an SEO Strategy?
Driving traffic to your website and converting users is obviously the aim of the game.
Easier said than done right?
Well despite all the aspects of SEO and wider online marketing the principles are the same as offline marketing.
Take the example of a shop. You can’t simply open up a shop and wait for people to recommend you to succeed in driving customers and footfall to your shop.
Instead you need to use clever marketing to call attention to your new business and encourage people to take notice.
For instance, you may try some advertising, some discounts, a grand opening, free samples or even simply introducing yourself to the public.
Online marketing is the same. You need to draw attention to your website and your brand through multiple means.
You won’t simply rank overnight despite producing great content. This is where channels such as social media become a great starting point to boost your visibility and help keep the lights on.
Creating a strong social media following for your brand is a fantastic and effective way to drive traffic to your website.
As noted earlier the more active you are, the more relevant your promotions and the more engagement you drive will also bolster not only traffic to your website, but relevant traffic to your website.
As you’re still working on your wider SEO strategy of content creation, best practice technical setup and link building, this is a great way to start building interest and give users clarity on your brand and offerings as you grow and progress.
Though social signals (e.g. sharing, comments, likes, retweets etc) aren’t specifically included in the Google ranking algorithm (we SEOs suspect), it does have an indirect effect.
By this I mean, the more your content is shared the greater the likelihood of both site traffic and backlinks from other webmasters to your site.
As these factors are a direct impact on Google’s ranking algorithm it makes complete sense to focus on driving high engagement and traffic through social media channels.
The faster you can build traffic and authority, the more quickly your business will become successful.
Conclusion
Social media drives many benefits for businesses from brand building to SEO rankings and business value. Social media likes, comments, retweets and engagement might not be able to show a clear and direct link to generating business value but the correlation impact is clear – the more time you take to include your social media strategy as a strand of your wider brand strategy the more return you will reap over the longer term.
Don’t go overboard on salesy messages. Instead, remember you are amplifying your values, content, principles and personality to people not computers. Keep it relevant, keep it useful and above all keep your communications consistent and interesting.
I hope this guide on to how to use social media to drive business value was useful and informative. If you have any questions or views, I’d love to hear and respond to you in the comments section below.
