Posts

Social Media Strategy Audit

Many times we see that companies get involved in the world of social media without any real direction.  A business owner feels good being able to say that their company has a presence on all social media platforms. The problem is if you do not have a strategy behind what you are doing; it can simply result in a lot of wasted time with no real gain in the business bottom line. We see companies every day that post in social media, but tend to feel that social media is not providing them with any results.  It is not a weakness of social media as much as it is a weakness in the strategy behind the post.

Our advice, step back and either do your own social media audit or hire a consultant that can give you great data about your social media campaign.  We would say leave it to the experts (shameless plug coming). Let a company like Selsi Enterprises dissect your current plan and give you some sound techniques to move forward with your efforts on social media.

A good social media strategy audit takes about 2 months to conduct. This audit typically compares what you are doing in the social media sphere to what your competitors are doing. This audit should also take a look at what you are doing versus where your customers are and what they may prefer in the way of social communication. Finally, you should end up with recommendations that can be measured over time.

Once small business owners conduct a social media audit, it is amazing how they see the results start to stack up versus the time before they had a specific strategy. What keeps most business owners from hiring a consultant to perform this audit is a concern surrounding the cost. A business owner should look at this as an investment in business growth.  This is a short term expense that can lead to a long term gain.  As I have polled consultants in 2012 on what they charge for their social media strategy audits, I have seen a range in terms of prices, services, and guarantees.  For a quality audit, the price range is 5K to 8K. Typically a consultant will allow a business owner to break this expense up into multiple payments over the 2 month timeframe. It really depends on the consultant!

Get out your Social Media Yard Stick

In marketing, we all know that you are going to hear the phrase, “what is my ROI?”  What is the return that I will get for placing my money into this form of advertising?  It is a hard question to answer when talking about social media.  I am wondering if we are deep enough into social media to be able to properly measure the tool.  I think there are many that are doing a great job at generalizing the data that they receive.

One important factor that companies, be they small or large, need to realize is that social media is for the point of being social.  You can not continue to push the same old information that you have pushed in traditional media.  In order for social media to be successful, one must jump in and engage with an audience that may very well already be talking about your brand.  If your brand is not being discussed, think of ways to get on the minds of your possible customers.

In actuality, there are many tools that can be used in combination to figure out if you are hitting the mark with your current social media campaign. In researching ROI tools for our clients, here are a few that we do not mind recommending:

Radian6 – This tool is not the cheapest for a small business owner or a nonprofit to use, but it is extremely useful in all that it is capable of measuring.

Lithium Social Media Monitoring – This one is really easy on the eyes because it is based on the look and feel of Google. Lithium measures a variety of negative and positive signals that can give you a great overview to deliver in any upcoming presentation.

Trendrr – Many consider this to be very web 3.0 in its make up. This gives the user real time data that it gathers from microblogs, searc, social, and even video.  Many that we have spoken with love the location based specific data that they are able to obtain almost instantly.

If you have any ROI tools that you are successfully using, please let us know.  We love to share this information with our readers in the hopes of helping those that may be in a rut with showing their return on investment.