Answer these 5 Questions to Ensure Greater Social Media Success

Did you know that there are approximately 2.3 billion active social media users throughout the world?

From Twitter to Facebook, from Instagram to Pinterest, these people use social media to connect with others, gather information, and share content.

As a business owner, it’s imperative to understand the power and reach of social media. Even if you’ve ignored this in the past, there’s always time to change your approach in the future.

If you’ve yet to achieve success through your social media marketing strategy, here are five questions to answer. By doing so, you’ll find yourself in position to change your fortunes in the months to come.

1. Do You Have a Comprehensive Strategy?

This is the most important question to address, as social media success is based largely on the strategy you implement.

You can’t post an update today, skip tomorrow, and hope to get back on track the next day. To achieve success with your social media plan, it’s a must that you have a strategy in place from day one.

For example, some people feel that it’s best to build their personal brand via social media. By doing so, you can position yourself as a thought leader in your space.

Others, however, spend more resources on building the social following of their actual company.

As long as you have a comprehensive strategy that will keep you on track, you’ll never find yourself lost and looking for answers.

2. What Are You Hoping to Accomplish?

This goes along with the above question. As you create your strategy, you need to make a list of short and long term goals.

Some of the most common goals associated with a social media marketing campaign include:

• To increase brand visibility.

• To drive more traffic to your website.

• To connect with prospects.

• To establish yourself and/or your brand as an industry leader.

It doesn’t matter if more traffic is at the top of your list or you’re most interested in generating leads, make sure you set goals and track your progress.

Note: here is a list of 10 social media KPIs you should track and monitor.

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3. What Type of Content Will You Share?

It’s one thing to say you’re going to spend more time, money, and resources on social media marketing. It’s another thing entirely to share the type of content that will get your brand noticed.

As you create your social media strategy, this is one of the most important questions to answer. If you don’t have anything to share, if all you do is follow the crowd, you’ll find it extremely difficult to make progress.

Fortunately, there are many types of content you can share via your social channels.

Before getting started, remember this: different social media networks call for different types of content.

If you’re posting on Twitter, you’ll need to keep your updates short and sweet. However, with Facebook, you can go into more depth.

Also, don’t forget that there is more to content than the written world. Sure, sharing blog posts via social media is a great idea, but don’t stop there.

As a general rule of thumb, you should do two things when answering this question:

• Make a general list of the type of content you want to share.

• Segment your list based on the content that is best for each platform.

You won’t achieve much social success unless you have content to share. For this reason, you must answer this question early on.

4. Are You Using the Right Tools?

As you probably know, a well crafted social media strategy can eat up a lot of time. This is why the most successful social media marketers rely heavily on the use of tools.

While there are many tools to consider, you don’t want to overdo it to the point of confusion. Instead, choose three to five that will save you the most time and go from there.

Hootsuite is a great example of a tool that can save you time, keep you organized, and allow you to stay on the same page as the rest of your team. In short, it allows you to manage all your social media accounts from a single dashboard.

In addition to third party tools, don’t overlook those that are developed by the individual social media platforms. For instance, Facebook offers a variety of tools for creating ads.

As you spend more time growing your social presence, you’ll learn more about the available tools and which ones can have the biggest impact on your business.

5. Are You Tracking Your Progress?

As exciting as it may be to get involved with social media marketing, you don’t want to continue down the same path if you aren’t achieving the expected results.

It’s your responsibility to track your progress, as this will show you what’s working, what isn’t, and how to make changes down the road.

There are KPIs (see above) associated with every social media platform. If Twitter is your channel of choice, closely track your number of followers and likes. Are you achieving the weekly and monthly growth you’ve come to expect?

You can also review the performance related to each update, as this gives you a clear idea of the type of content your audience enjoys.

Conclusion

Although it’s extremely easy to use the most popular social media services, there’s nothing simple about generating positive results for your business.

If you want to achieve greater social media success in the future, answer the five questions detailed above. From there, you’ll find yourself in position to move forward in the appropriate direction.

Would you add any other questions to this list? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.