A new year is a great time to revamp your social media efforts. Maybe you have pages on multiple social media platforms, but are only interacting on one of them. Maybe you have fallen off on your posting consistency or tracking efforts. Now is a good time to hash out a new plan and stop doing what isn’t working.
Critically evaluating your pages can seem like a daunting task, but it’s worth it to achieve better interactions and engagement. Social media is an important platform for businesses. It can drive traffic, encourage customer loyalty and help your store connect with students on a personal level. However, it can also be time consuming and the return on your time investment is far from guaranteed. Goals should be set and your progress working toward those goals should be measured.
Try these steps to set your social media presence back on track this year.
- Review your current page or pages.
Chances are, you operate a page for your store on more than one social media platform so you can reach a larger market of students. What typically happens for those of us with too little time in our days is the same post is shared across platforms and we go about our day. Now is the time to look at each of your store’s pages. Write down the current stats for each (followers, reach, number of posts per day, etc.), look at the post analytics to determine the type of post that performs the best and check out your referral traffic from each site. Use this data to determine if any of the pages aren’t performing well.
For example, if you have a profile on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and your website gets some traffic from Instagram and Twitter, but your Facebook page does nothing, cut the dead weight. While a Facebook page might work for some, it isn’t giving you the return on your time investment. Limit your focus just to the platforms that are connecting with the audience to save yourself time and better focus your message. - Evaluate the data you collected.
Go to the data collected in step one on post performance and interaction and evaluate it. Is there a particular type of post that does better than others? A particular time of day? Using this information, are there easy changes you can make to the way you post on social media? If you can identify a time or type of post that does well, you can replicate its success. But, remember that just because something does well on one platform doesn’t mean it will perform the same on others. Each page should be evaluated on its own because presumably you are reaching a different audience.
For example, let’s say you post two times a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Your morning post typically gets more likes and clicks than the afternoon post. Maybe posting twice in the morning would be more effective than spreading out the posts. Or, perhaps you typically post an image in the morning and a link in the afternoon. Try posting an image in both the morning and afternoon to see if your audience is more likely to engage with something visual than click on a link. - Set a goal.
Determine realistic, but challenging, goals for your pages that would help you increase your return on investment. Whether it is having more followers or website referrals, set a quantifiable goal that you can measure. - Make a plan.
You are a busy person. Having a social media plan will help you manage your time spent online and make sure you are working toward the goal you set. Take into account the easy changes you identified in step two as well as areas you feel like your page fell short on. Perhaps, you haven’t tried posting video on your page. Maybe the page has mostly been used to inform students about sales, so this year you want to try make the page more interactive and fun for your followers. You might want to try hosting more social media takeovers or conduct student polls. Make a plan and set a date in the future where you will re-evaluate your progress toward reaching your goals. For ideas, check out our monthly marketing plan Think, Plan, Do.
What social media platform works best for your store? We want to hear from you.
