It seems like once or twice a month a new social media site grabs the collective attention of the marketing community, stealing not only our attention (and occasionally our hearts), but also our valuable money and time. We know we can’t possibly be everywhere at once, but we try anyway (often at the expense, and occasionally to the detriment, of our clients).
We need to stop wasting our time and money “playing around” on the hottest new social media site and start treating social like exactly what it is: a marketing channel. Would you advise your clients to run a nationwide ad campaign without testing it somewhere first? No! Luckily, social media sites are even easier to test than an ad campaign and we are going to make it even easier by telling you how to do it.
Assess Current Networks:
Before you can have any idea how new social media networks are performing for you, you’ll need to have some idea how your current networks are performing. This means taking a look at how you are performing both “inside of social media” (a topic we looked at in ”Metrics That Matter”) and how well your social is helping drive traffic and conversions on your website (I suggest tracking this with Google Analytics, a topic Nicole Rose Dion from The Abbi Agency makes a lot less scary, here.) Once you know how well you are doing with your current social networks, you can set your goals and expectations for new sites.
Look at Audience Trends in New Networks:
Audience profiling is something we stress a lot here at Greener Grass, because it works. It’s a safe bet that the majority of people in the audience of a ballet shoe company (regardless of whether they are soft or pointe shoes!) is probably not 50-year-old men who drive trucks for a living (although you might sell a few pairs to them, as well). You are going to make the majority of your sales to families with younger daughters and occasionally professional dancers. Therefore your content, regardless of whether it is on your website or social media, should be interesting to and written for this group of people and not for the 50-year-old trucker. New social media networks can be looked at in the same way. If the majority of the audience on a new social media site cares more about trucking than ballet, it’s a safe bet that you can put that social site on your back burner and not spend a ton of time trying to make it work.
Measure Performance on New Networks:
Using the measurements you derived from looking at your existing social sites, you need to begin tracking how helpful these new sites are to your overall marketing effort. If your new social site has a hundred “fans” and drives as much traffic as your 10,000 Facebook Fans, it’s certainly worth investing more time and effort into the new network, but if you don’t measure your existing networks you have no baseline to find out if the new networks are even the least bit helpful. You’ll often be surprised by how effective new sites can be (especially if you look at their audiences before you dive in head first) and will start to notice how right (and often wrong) the advice of the “marketing experts” is when it comes to you and your clients (hint: Google+ is not a ghost town and actually has a surprisingly large contingent of non-techy users!)
Still have no clue where to start or think I’m crazy for not falling head over heels for every new social site that rolls? Leave us a note in the comments section below!
Photo Credit: Flickr user bluefountainmedia
