Conducting a Successful Social Media Campaign

If you're running a business in 2014 then you have likely thought about a social-media campaign. It is a trend that businesses are increasingly adopting as part of their overall marketing campaigns, but it can be daunting. In fact, just because social-media is becoming ever more ubiquitous doesn't mean that everyone is using it successfully.

Many social-media campaigns make the mistake of just chasing likes and follows. This is an easy trap to fall into when creating a social media campaign, after all there are studies that claim a Facebook like is worth $174. It seems reasonable then, that earning as many likes or follows as possible is a worthwhile goal for a social media campaign. So how valuable are your likes really? If your follower isn't buying anything or performing an action that actually means something to your business, that follow doesn't matter. The only thing that a like or a follow means is that someone knows you exist.

Don't set out on your social media campaign with the goal of just getting as many likes as possible. If you get 10,000 likes on Facebook but no one visits your website, it was a wasted effort. A successful social media campaign doesn't end at gaining likes or follows, but focuses on how to utilize your followers. A successful social-media campaign starts with social media but ends with some sort of measurable action like a visit to your website, a request for more information or a purchase.

When creating your social-media campaign, it is important to first figure out what an actual, worthwhile task is that you want people to do. What kind of engagement are you looking for? What are your marketing objectives? You need to clearly define your goals in order to make your likes or follows worthwhile, if you do nothing with your likes they are not helping you. Figuring out what your goals are and what you are trying to get out of social media are important to creating your campaign. So what does success look like? Suppose you are a non-profit group and your focus is on raising awareness. Success may look like more people being aware of your cause, media hits, good stories in the media, people visiting your website or more people requesting information.

After you've decided on your marketing objectives your next step is figuring out how to use social media to help you accomplish your objective. Suppose again that you are the non-profit group who is trying to raise awareness and one of the goals of your social-media campaign is to get people on your website requesting information. The next step is to figure out what you should post on your social media platforms to get people interested in your information. It could be trivia, interesting facts or a compelling image that viewers will want to click on and share. Start posting your content and looking at the analytics for all of your posts. With your goal in mind, measure how successful each post was in reaching this goal. Use what you've learned to create more posts like the ones that work and stop posting what didn't work. This is a trial and error process, so don't be afraid to try something new or creative.

So how do you measure your posts? It is important to define your metrics early on in your campaign so that you know how to measure whether you have met your goals or not. Since you will be using your metrics to analyze your posts and guide you on your campaign, it is very important to look at quality metrics that provide you with relevant information about how you are meeting your goals. It is easy to fall into the trap of just idly watching your likes go up, but since you haven't accomplished anything with likes alone, try not to focus on these metrics. Instead, try looking at your Facebook page with Google analytics to see how high your referrals are or to monitor traffic and click-through rates.

If this all seems familiar it is because these are basic marketing principles that have been applied to digital marketing, but is important to not loose sight of these.  In order to create any successful marketing campaign it is necessary to define your goals, figure out how to reach your goals and then measure your success.  Conducting a social-media campaign is no different.