Let’s Get Digital: Thinking Bigger on Social Media with Allegra Chapman

Onwards and upwards with our Let’s Get Digital rundown, and moving on to the world of social media. Here’s Allegra’s tips on thinking bigger with your strategy…

Why is it important?

Why do we even use social media as a marketing tool? Isn’t it just a platform for pictures of our food and comments from our nans? The answer is no. Social media is actually essential for a range of business needs, including building brand awareness, keeping on top of your customer service, talking to your customers and sharing industry news.

It is NOT simply a platform for getting likes and follows. We’ll get into the reasons why in a second.

However, what you might not have known is that social media can also have a powerful impact on your other marketing channels.

SEO

When it comes to SEO, social media makes search engines happy. Strong volumes of traffic coming from social media send authority signals to Google and the like, helping to boost your organic visibility. Traffic specifically from your brand accounts tells the search engine that these accounts are legitimately connected with your business, and ones to pay attention to. This is where followers and engagement play a part. Search engines love it when you have a large following of engaged users. They don’t love it when you’re serving content to an audience who gives nothing back – this means they’re unengaged and the content you’re producing is irrelevant to them. It’s sad but true.

PPC

PPC is all about the keywords and social media is a great way to nab them. Social listening tools can help you to identify potential useful terms that can help boost the effectiveness of your marketing efforts across the board. Combined PPC and social strategies also get your brand in front of a larger audience. In fact, people who have been exposed to social media campaigns prior to seeing a PPC ad are twice as likely to click said ad because they’re engaged with your brand and feel you are trustworthy. These users are then twice as likely to convert.

Email

Social media can play a vital role in data capture, and each platform has some form of capture format already set up. Once they’re signed up, keeping a beady eye on what they’re talking about can help you to decide what content to serve up to them in an email. Last but not least, engaged email subscribers are amongst your biggest fans. It’s safe to say they’re a key source of an even larger database and following. That means that encouraging these users to share on social the content that you’ve sent them in an email could be a quick-win tactic.

So, why don’t we chase likes and follows?

Finally, the question we know you’ve been waiting for. As we said, likes and follows are no bad thing, as long as they’re coming from the right people. The danger with chasing these specifically, though, is that they are only vanity metrics. It might be nice to have 10,000 followers but if they’re not engaged that means nothing. If you get stuck chasing numbers like this, you won’t be focused on what really matters. The wrong audience will reduce your engagement stats, which in turn, will reduce your reach – social platforms, like search engines, don’t want to serve irrelevant information to their users, and so if your content gets low levels of engagement they’ll avoid serving content from you to many people in future. So make sure everything you do is centred around attracting and engaging the right people, as well as supporting your overall marketing and business goals.

Creating a social plan that works

When you’re putting together your strategy, there’s a few things to check. We’ve broken them down into bitesized chunks:

• What are you doing on other channels? Everything should be joined up to communicate a consistent overall message and identity.
• Pay attention to the wins as well as losses. What does well and what doesn’t?
• How can you add value to your audience?

We’ve got some handy guides ready and waiting for you to keep your social media marketing in top condition. However, if you still need some help, you just have to pick up the phone.

You can sign up to our monthly email newsletter by filling in the form below to get all the latest Cobb Digital news and information, as well as to hear about future events, blogs and whitepapers from our team.