Lesson 5: Social Media Marketing

Before setting goals and creating a social marketing plan, it’s good to understand what has worked in the past. A good start can be to visit the analytics and insights section of the different accounts and write down all the demographic characteristics of the audience and which type of content performed well. Analysis of referral traffic (coming from links included in other websites pointing to the company’s website) can also be useful for understanding which social networks channel the most traffic. Assessing the activity of competitors is an absolute must-do;

The audit of the previous point already provides some indications on the company’s social audience. The next step is to define the audience personas, which represent the typical traits of the target audience – demographics, content preferences, job, interest;

Whether it’s about improving brand awareness, engaging, generating leads or improving reach (therefore increasing interest in posts and tweets), you need to start with a clear understanding of the objectives of a Social Media Marketing campaign. These must also be combined with metrics and KPIs that allow you to understand at a glance the progress of the campaign, which goals have been achieved and which have not. If the goal is to improve brand visibility on social media, then the metrics to focus on will be reach or coverage (how many people have seen the post) and the number of impressions. If, on the other hand, the company aims to improve traffic from social networks, the KPI to be favored will be the Click Through Rate (CTR), which gives an idea of how many readers, intrigued by a post, have clicked on the link it contains and visited the corporate website. Finally, if the goal is to convert, and therefore push the post target to perform an action such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading an App or buying, then the metric to take into consideration is the Bounce Rate. , which indicates how quickly a user who visited the website left it;

The social content management strategy must be shaped on the defined objectives and on the audience personas identified as relevant. The contents must intrigue, inform, engage and persuade the audience. The definition of an editorial calendar will allow you to automate the activity of publishing posts through one of the many platforms available;

Paid ads on social media allow you to increase traffic on the institutional website, improve brand awareness and engagement, increase leads and sales. In general, they make the investment in social networks themselves more sensible, understood as the creation of valuable content and moderation of the community: without a minimum of sponsored posts, the organic coverage of the channels risks being very minimal for the company pages;

Social Media Marketing is an activity that has a strong experimental component and never stops: we talk about Social Media Management, and there are numerous tools that help management. Therefore, we must not be overwhelmed by any negative results or results not in line with expectations, but understand that the SMM is a matter of continuous tweaks and adjustments. What was good last month may not be good today. New social platforms gain the trust of users and it could be convenient to include them in the campaign. Followers, then, are often fascinated by new trends so you must always be informed about fashion trends and, if necessary, make them your own.