Ensuring the C-level understand the steps to social media success

It is interesting to see what many CXOs consider to be social media success. Some on the executive leadership team just see the numbers - the vanity stats. For example, they see their Twitter account has 80,000 followers, or that their Facebook page has thousands of likes and they assume that they are successful in their social media activities. This not quite true!

Social media is only successful if your brand is communicating and building relationships with your target market, which will ultimately convert into new business or repeat business. There is no point in a kitchen design firm from Northamptonshire, UK, or Des Moines, Iowa having 6,000 likes on their Facebook page, if those likes are all from people in Cambodia. 

Social media success will rarely happen overnight. When you break it down, there are really only four steps to achieve social media success: 

1 - Build & maintain your platforms The oft-used phrase, “If you build it, they will come” is a cliche, but there is no getting away from the fact that if your company's platform presence isn’t professionally designed and maintained, if you have inactive or poorly designed landing pages, or have not bothered to keep your social presence updated and relevant, then this will affect on your overall performance. 

2 - Grow your network If you do not have a network of people to talk to online, then you are really just talking to yourself! “Social” media has social in the title for a reason! It's imperative that the marketing team create a strategy for growing your network online for each platform. Decide and define who your target market is and start to follow your existing customers, desired customers as well as thought-leaders in your space. There are myriad tools out there (both paid and free) to find people on Twitter. Check out LikeAlyzer to increase your Facebook performance, or boost some of your posts on Facebook with a limited test budget to see how it grows your audience. Make sure that your strategy and performance are reviewed at least every six weeks as your social media or marketing team build your following, connections and likes. 

3 - Define a listening, engagement and content strategy This is probably the area where most businesses fail with digital marketing, particularly on social. Their posts are all over the place, with no consistency. They produce content that doesn't add value. They fail to set up listening strategies to respond to people who are talking about them online (good and bad). Try mention.com which offers a 14-day trial to help you listen to your audience. The scattergun approach to producing content does not work. Make sure that you are using a social media management system such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck and start planning what you are going to say and do. Decide on a blogging topic for the month and plan what you are going to write about, with set dates for publication. But the most important strategy in Step 3 is the word “engagement”. Thank people for mentioning your brand in a Tweet, ask people questions, comment on others’ posts etc. You must engage with people in order to build those important relationships that lead to business and referrals. 

4 - Measure the results As with any type of marketing, whether it is printing leaflets, your website activity, special offers etc., you need to measure the results, and social media activity is no different. If you don’t know what is working and what is not working then how do you know if it is successful? Whilst vanity metrics such as number of likes and followers have a place, you need to be going to the next level and measuring engagement - how many people have been exposed to your social media content and, of them, how many are going to become customers of your business? Remember the adage: 

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. 

albert einstein 

It makes good business sense for the marketing team to be measuring your activities, but crucially, sharing that insight with the C-Suite. If it’s digital then it’s trackable, traceable and accountable; meaning that the data is there to accurately measure and draw conclusions, helping the leadership to make sound business decisions, each and every time.