Social media has ushered in a cost effective mass communications channel. The great thing about social it is that it offers brands greater accountability than mass advertising mediums like radio, TV and newspapers. You can see exactly how many fans or followers you have and the many ways in which they interact with you is measurable. Driving engagement is the main thrust of any promotional activity on social media.

If a brand’s social audience is appreciative of the messages sent out by it then they will engage with the brand, thereby amplifying the brand’s marketing messages.

Much like a crowd gathering around an amazingly talented street performer, engaging content starts pulling crowds towards the brand in droves. 

This goes a long way in ensuring that the brand features prominently in their audience’s buying journey. It’s therefore important to recognize when your social media strategy is going wrong.

Your share of voice is abysmal

You don’t have to spend nearly as much as the top contender in your domain to be successful on social media. It’s not about buying the prime airtime slots and signing a sports celebrity to star in your ad campaign. It’s all about connecting with your audience in a meaningful way and giving the right kind of stimulus to keep the conversation going.

Your share of voice is a good indicator of how well you are connecting with your audience. Share of voice is a metric which tells you how the volume of your brand’s conversations relatively stack up with your competitors. You know you’ve got a problem if your share of the conversations pie is the smallest. It means that other players in your industry are drowning your conversations out.

While comparing your conversations volume with others, make sure that you are not tracking contest related conversations that are in no way connected with the brand’s core offering. Case in point: Life Insurance brands which indulge in contests for the sake of driving online buzz through contest fanatics. Use your listening tool’s exclusions feature to eliminate irrelevant conversations and get the most accurate numbers.

Your competitors have influencers with followers greater than yours

Compare your Twitter profile with your competitors and see who yours and your competitor’s influencers are. If the followers of your top 5 influencers are less than the others than it’s time to dedicate efforts towards engaging the top influencer in your domain. To be more explicit – it’s time to ask yourselves “How can I engage my competitor’s influencers now that I’ve spotted them?”

While you are on the subject, you should also assess which of your followers are worth engaging with. For instance, it makes no sense to engage with someone who has not been active in the last 3 months even if that user has got a substantial number of followers. Plus, you should allow your social media tool to identify all followers who have no less than 2500 followers and devise a strategy to attract their attention.

You don’t have a consistent turn-around-time

Social media users expect a quick response to queries/concerns raised by them. Typically there are three stages to managing responses – Acknowledgement, Progress Update and Resolution. You may not be able to resolve your customer’s grievance immediately but the fact that you cannot acknowledge the issue raised by them within 30 minutes should be of concern to you. Most top-of-the-line listening tools have Social CRM features built into them to manage responses and track the response team’s turn-around-time. Check out our video which explains the Social CRM workflow in detail.

Ideal resolution time will vary from industry to industry, but it’s important to benchmark the turnaround time in the listening tool to prioritize responses and be consistent. This is one metric on which you don’t want to be caught off-guard by your competition.

Your engagement as percentage of fans is the lowest

This should send alarm bells ringing across the marketing department. Engagement is a yardstick through which you can gauge the potency of your social media strategy. If your engagement as a percentage of fans is the lowest, it simply means that your strategy is the weakest. Content is King! It’s at the heart of every social media strategy.

Top social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn are partial towards different types of content. If you want to succeed on Twitter, your tweets should be witty and the right hashtags need to be used. If Instagram is your primary social media channel, then your images and videos should be rich and worthy of engaging with. If you want to win on Facebook, then not only should your images and videos should be powerful but you should be prepared to pump in a lot of money towards promoting your posts. If you want to connect with your audience on LinkedIn then content which is insightful and helps your audience do their job better will work for you.

It’s a recommended practice to check your engagement as percentage of fans on a weekly basis. Every dip in this engagement chart warrants a change in the strategy being employed. On some occasions it may turn out that your choice of social media channel is probably not accurate. It’s therefore important to track each of your social media profiles on a regular basis to allocate necessary resources towards the one that is giving your brand a better response.

You are not sure what are the top issues being discussed by your audience

What’s the use of being efficient and resolving issues when you are not taking the necessary steps to avoid them in the first place? Not only is it important for you to respond to every brand conversation but also to classify each into its appropriate conversation bucket. For that reason, you should make optimal and regular use of word cloud for each of your social media platforms. You should delve in each prominent keyword to discover the various aspects and their sentiment.

If this is done diligently, then at any given point of time brand managers can analyze frequently complained or appreciated aspect of their business. All gathered social insights should be shared through the length and breadth of the organisation. Social insights can help organisations to be proactive in catering to the requirements and expectations of their audience.