It’s a contentious issue isn’t it: What’s the ROI of social media?

How, as a marketer, CMO or product manager, do you justify time and money spent on social media efforts? The only metric that really counts is revenue, but how do you tie the two together? Unless you’re actually transacting online, such as through an online shopping platform, how do you know if what you’re doing is working?

Here are just 3 things you can do to improve your social media success:

1. Be specific about who you’re marketing to. Create content specifically for your target customer. Are you selling garden services? Then target managing agents for residential complexes, or home owners who live in leafy suburbs. City apartment dwellers are NOT your customers.
2. Create as much content as necessary to stand out from the crowd. A Facebook or LinkedIn feed is overflowing and chances are slim that all of your followers will see all of your content, never mind people who don’t follow you. Let’s just say that posting once or twice a week is NOT going to cut it. For every topic you post about, re-purpose it for every platform you’re active on: blog, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.
3. Distribute your content effectively. No longer can you simply rely on posting your content to your company page. You need to share it across the platforms in the appropriate groups, have your employees, customers and colleagues share it and don’t forget that sponsoring the content and promoting it to a pre-defined (and specific) audience will reach people who don’t even know you exist.

OK what now?

Now that you’ve created specific content and targeted a very specific set of customers, you’ll easily be able to know if your strategy is working, because you’ll either get calls, emails or messages relating to that content, product or service; or you won’t.

This article is really just scratching the surface – there is so much else to consider, like growing your audience, building trust and credibility by serving your audience, demonstrating your authority by posting about topics which are relevant to your industry – I could go on and on….

If there’s one thing you should do today, if you haven’t already, is get started and be consistent. Pick an audience and begin serving them regularly with helpful, valuable, appropriate content.

Social Media marketing, if one has to call it something, is the least expensive, most wide-reaching form of promotion available today, and if you’re not doing it you’re missing an incredible opportunity.