Understanding the importance of social media analytics is key to unlocking maximum success for your business. Every like, share and comment helps companies to leverage their content and gain valuable insights to their audience, content performance and overall strategy. In this blog, we will dive into social media analytics and why they’re crucial for maximizing impact and achieving your goals.
Understanding Your Audience
Social media analytics provide you with audience demographics and behaviors that can aid you in content creation. By knowing metrics such as age, gender, location and interests, you can have a deeper understanding of who your audience is and what resonates with them. This information will allow you to tailor your content to better meet their needs, increase engagement and build stronger relationships with your community.
Evaluating Content Performance
Analyzing your social media performance and engagement is essential to maximizing your content with your audience. By examining metrics such as shares, comments, link clicks and likes, you can identify trends and patterns in your content performance. For example, you can see when the best posting times are for your business and what type of content performs the best, like products, behind-the-scenes or company news. Knowing these insights will help you to refine your content strategy, focus on what works best and optimize future posts.
Monitoring Brand Awareness
Brand reputation is everything in 2024, and social media analytics allow you to monitor your brand awareness or also commonly called brand sentiment. You can track mentions, tagging and comments of what people are saying about your company or products. By listening to what people are saying about your brand online, you can address any issues or concerns in a timely manner and foster a positive brand image.
Making Strategic Decisions
Ultimately, social media analytics empower you to make informed strategic decisions that drive results. Adjusting your content strategy allows you to make confident decisions that are backed by real evidence. This approach to social media development ensures that your company is constantly improving and staying ahead of the curve of the ever-changing social media platforms.
In conclusion, social media analytics are not just numbers on a screen – they are powerful tools for driving growth, engagement and success. By leveraging analytics to understand your audience, evaluate content performance, monitor brand awareness and inform strategic decision-making, you can unlock the full potential of your social media presence and achieve your goals. So, don’t overlook the importance of social media analytics – dive in, explore, and let the data guide your journey to success.
Social media trends are always changing, especially year after year for B2B marketers. In a recent post from WTWH Media, they break down six social media trends that you need to know about for 2024. In this blog, we will be taking a look at each trend and why you might want to incorporate them into your 2024 strategy.
Trend One: SEO
SEO isn’t just for your website but can be used on your social media platforms as well. Google is always ranking and optimizing search results for users. Creating practical and helpful social media content can help to drive traffic to your account. Consider adding keywords to captions, descriptions and hashtags to your posts as leveraging SEO can lead to a 30-percent higher engagement rate.
Trend Two: Social Media Platforms
Over the years we’ve seen many social media platforms pop up, but this doesn’t mean your brand should join every social media app you see. When it comes to social media, brands should prioritize quality over quantity. Companies should focus their time and energy on platforms that resonate with their target audience.
Trend Three: AI
AI is here to stay in 2024! AI can help marketers brainstorm content ideas and provide support to save time while giving valuable insights. Several platforms have AI tools for marketers to use such as listening tools, AI-generated images, writing assistants and more! While AI can assist with ideas, marketers are still the brains and leaders when it comes to marketing.
Trend Four: Authenticity
While AI-generated content is spreading, it’s important to keep high-quality, human-led content at the top of your strategies. Right now, nonpromotional content is the number one type of content consumers don’t see enough of from companies. Think about the type of content you’re posting for your audience and think about what they might find valuable. Leaning into community engagement and nonpromotional content can build trust with your audience. Try showcasing employees, company events or even behind-the-scenes content to strengthen brand reputation.
Trend Five: Influencers
Influencers are for every company, especially within the trades! Many brands are having success with utilizing micro- and macro-influencers. When working with influencers, you can target your audience and showcase your products to them. Other influencers for your brand are your employees. Employees can provide trusted expert content and drive authentic engagement for your brand.
Trend Six: Video
The growth of video has skyrocketed, particularly short-form video content. This doesn’t mean you can’t use long-form video, and since social media keeps expanding their video length, we might see an increase in how long videos are. At the same time, the human attention span has shrunk to 8.25 seconds. If you’re not already, think about adding videos to your marketing mix for social media. Videos are a great way to capture the attention of your audience and provide valuable information they’re seeking.
If you’re not already using one of the ideas listed above in your 2024 plan, think about adding it! With the everchanging social media platforms, it’s important to stay on top of the game against your competitors. Check out the full article from WTWH Media to learn more.
Social media is a valuable source for brands to hear feedback from customers, listen to concerns and engage with their followers. As a brand you might feel that turning off comments can help to prevent negativity, keep the focus on your product, save money from having to monitor comments and feel exclusive. But turning comments off on social media or ads is a bad business practice that should be avoided. In this blog, we will break down why you should keep your comments on.
Opens Conversations
Social media is a great place to listen to your customers and have open conversations about your brand and/or products. It also allows customers to engage with other customers about the products. We’ve seen comments before where one negative comment leads to multiple positive comments from other customers touting them on why they love the products. Allowing these open conversations lets your customers engage with each other or provide product concerns that need to be addressed.
If a customer has a negative experience with your product or service, wouldn’t you want to know about it? Or if they have a question about how to use it, wouldn’t you want to help them? Turning off comments would only lead to upset customers and never provide insights into any problems within your business.
Creative Ideas
By having open conversations on social media, it can develop ideas that your business can implement. If you see negative comments about a specific product, you could write a blog or press release on the item to debunk these comments and spread awareness on the item. Additionally, social media comments could lead to creative ideas of what you could do at a tradeshow, whether it be fun booth ideas, giveaways or a trades influencer who wants to meet up and learn more about your brand.
How to Handle Negative Feedback
Now that we have discussed why keeping the comments on is beneficial for your brand, let’s discuss how to handle any negative comments you might receive.
Make sure to reply to their comments! Most times, negative comments are coming from a bad experience, so ask “can you please email or message us with more detailing regarding your issue.” This will show other customers that you’re being attentive and taking note of any problems customers might have. Also, remember everything on the internet is public for everyone, so not responding or leaving an aggressive comment towards your customer would reflect badly on the company.
Another alternative to turning off comments that you shouldn’t do is deleting or hiding comments. Hiding comments can weaken the trust between you and your followers and make you appear to be hiding something. Social media is meant to be conversational, so you should show your customers that you are receptive to both positive and negative feedback and want to encourage discussion. Check out our full blog post on “best practices for handling negative comments” to learn more.
Before you turn your comments off on social media or ads, think about the feedback you could be missing. Be open to having conversations with customers to see how you can improve any concerns that may need to be addressed.
With the ongoing concern about our nation’s skills gap, the option for choosing an education to pursue a vocational career is certainly an attractive one. With plentiful skilled labor jobs to fill, trade jobs pay very well (sometimes better than four-year college degrees) and don’t saddle students with hefty student loans.
In an article from SJVC, a private career college, they discuss more than 20 resources for maintenance training. With a variety of resources, you can expand your knowledge about the industrial market and explore your career options.
General Resources and Publications
Sometimes the best place to learn more is by reading more about it. By reading publications that correspond with the industrial market, you can learn more about what’s happening in the industry and about tips and tricks.
Video Series
Watching videos is a great way to do online training and gives insights on the daily work a maintenance worker might be doing. You may also expand your knowledge by watching training videos that can allow you to get an overview of the job and the tools you would be using.
Podcasts
Podcasts offer crucial information from someone who works in the career firsthand. Putting on a podcast is a great way to hear day-in-the-life reporting and an easy way to listen to tips.
Social Media
Social media is a valuable place to get recommendations, learn industry news and see insight into the career you want to enter. Social media can also help you look at a specific company and show you what they do in a day.
Check out the article from SJVC to see further in depth about each of these training resources.
The prominence of social media and the presence of a cellphone in everyone’s pockets means many things, two of which being that nothing is private, and your company needs a strong social media policy.
There are eight components to a firm social media policy:
Purpose
Your company needs to understand why the policy is being created to govern social media, and what it will means for your company’s social media going forward.
Definition
Clearly define what your company will classify as social media, the specific platforms, and how the company will use the platforms. Your HR department will also include a clearly defined cellphone use policy, as many companies prohibit the personal use of social media during company time.
Users
Establish who in the company will be authorized to contribute, engage with and respond to social media, and who will be monitoring their activities. Appoint a company photographer to oversee taking photos to post.
Ownership
Decide who is in charge of creating and selecting content with guidelines and schedules for posting. This person, or people, will handle any photo or video release forms.
Content
Plainly define the type of information that can and cannot be shared.
Employee Conduct
Create a code of conduct for employees to adhere to in order to prevent them from accidentally commenting about the company or a situation without the company’s knowledge, control and explicit consent.
Communication Risks
Establish guidelines, both general and specific, and best practices for the use of different social media platforms. Make sure to touch on copyright material, any trademarks, imagery guidelines and a list of topics that should never be posted.
Negative Comments Protocol
Make sure there is a well-defined protocol on how to handle a customer’s negative posts or comments, such as when to acknowledge them, when to delete them and how to handle potential threatening posts or comments. Marketing and human resources both must be involved and have a plan of action to minimize the impact of negative posts and comments. The more likes, shares, tags and attention the post gets, the more the narrative spins out of control.
Strong social media policies set expectations and parameters for potential situations that could harm a company’s reputation. Company success relies on the right social media engagement, so make it easy with a good social media policy.
