It’s 2018. Social media marketing platforms have been around long enough—and their platforms have become sophisticated enough—to be used as business and marketing tools. 

What to Keep in Mind With Your Social Media Marketing

You can now track conversions on and off-line for all the major platforms. If you’re an agency whose clients are using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, LinkedIn, or Pinterest as part of their digital marketing, you can now track and measure whether a social ad led to a purchase, on-site or in-store.

You can also be more precise. We’ve gone beyond the age of likes and impressions, and can now track clicks and views on ads, pages, and posts. That means that all social content—whether its relationship building or strictly advertising—just got more valuable, and has a better chance of offering strong returns on your clients’ investments.

It’s good to have high levels of interaction, sure. But if you can’t attach that interaction to a transaction, it’s not an accurate show of how content is helping marketing— and it could be a waste of money.

Social media can now provide yet another way for marketers to show clients exactly where their traffic, engagement, and sales revenue are coming from, so their marketing techniques can get even more laser-focused.

While no one should go all-social-all-the-time, social is still a dominant force. The key decision isn’t do I spend money on social? It’s how much do I spend, and on what?

That’s where good data analysis, testing, and reporting can help. Understanding of your page/ad analytics will stop overspending, and get the right content in front of the right customers. Of the platforms, experts predict Facebook will keep leading the pack.

Social Media Marketing Optimization

Just like the rest of your content, optimization is key for social. And that’s not just an empty buzzword. It’s an ongoing process that involves:

• Creating content specific to what your customers want, and what your brand delivers.
• Watching how the content performs.
• Testing slight variations of content to find the best performers.
• Using the best performers for every product/service you offer, across every platform

Optimizing should always stay front-of-mind, but social is a fun place to try new things. You can experiment with paid ads, blog-style posts, video, live stream, photos, discussion threads, and more.

In addition, different media or post types are going to perform better (or worse) on different platforms. So it’s important to keep a bird’s eye view of your content across all platforms. And don’t post identical content on every social page. Virtually everyone in your audience is likely to use multiple platforms (and follow you on each). If they see the same content everywhere, they will get bored.

Along with reporting and tracking improvements, there’s another way social media marketing is stronger than ever in 2018.

Influencer (or micro-influencer) marketing is something you need to look into if you’re determined to take social media marketing more seriously this year.

What’s influencer marketing? It’s trading influence in your field or industry with someone else whose work complements yours as a way of meeting sales and marketing goals.

For example, if you sell leadership resources and you follow someone on social who trains salespeople and managers, each of you could benefit from sharing one another’s products, services, and insights with your own followers.

Like anything else, you’ll need to prove that your influence (and theirs) are measurable and beneficial to everyone’s key objectives.

[How’s your social marketing going? Be sure. Request an analysis.]