Social Media Marketing – Data And Results Matter

One thing that has become obvious about the social media industry is change. Buzzwords, new trends and even big surveys that measure the next thing big business is focusing on in social are a never-ending stream of change. Content, influence marketing, analytics, engagement, branding, ROI and lead generation are just a few of the described “priorities” in at least one of the last several years in the industry. This moving target priority method is not expected to be going anywhere soon.

Although fast paced industries such as social media marketing, e-commerce and mobile are in a constant state of advancement and change, the goals that marketers focus on need to be more focused. If every time a new fad or buzzword appears, and the focus and goals get drastically changed, you can expect that results and management support will also.

Don’t get us wrong, we realize that social media is constantly changing and the executional requirements right along with it, but without focus on a clear objective of why you are in social, what you are trying to achieve and a steadfast plan to measure it, problems will arise.

For Example:

In a recent Harris Poll, 88% of professionals doing social media marketing consider it to be “important”. The data further showed that 82% of marketers strongly or somewhat strongly agree that analyzing social media engagement data can help improve their bottom line.

The Challenges:

At the same time and despite the plethora of monitoring and analytics solutions on the market today, social media marketing best practices, results and objectives seem allusive. Here’s the numbers to back that up.

• 84% of marketers said it helped them to engage with influencers like the media
• 84% said they thought social marketing could enhance relationships with existing customers
• 67% of marketers say that assessing the effectiveness of social media activities was a challenge for them
• 62% said designing and overall social media strategy was a challenge
• 59% believe that educating staff about social media was difficult
• 56% have a hard time making sense of the data gathered through social media
• 55% are finding it challenging to align social media strategies across departments
• 44% struggle with executive “buyin” on social media importance
• 42% said they find it difficult to know when to take action on data from social media

It is no wonder that organizations small and large alike are struggling to get real results from social media when general knowledge and commitment to required resources are at such drastic odds. Like any other component of business, data should drive decisions in social media marketing and the execution of the resulting efforts require commitment, experience and appropriate tools. If marketers and brands invested much more heavily on the front-end decision and commitment level of social media marketing, the decisions related to data, execution, strategy as well as tactics would be far more clear.

When social media marketing is executed with sound strategy and the commitment of expertise and resources are made, real measurable, dollar and cents results will appear. When and if they do not, one of the cogs in the wheel is improperly aligned. It’s not the medium that is the problem, it’s the fabrication of and the subsequent operators steering the wheel that determine whether social media is successful or not from one marketer to another.

 

A Social Media Marriage? No Wedding Bells, But Lots Of Benefits

**This free webinar has been rescheduled for March 26th at 10am PDT – Register here

We sure don’t want to burst your bubble, but this is not some wild, hair-raising story of two lovers that met on a social network and got married remotely over Twitter, although that does sound like something kind of fun. This announcement is about marrying of two technologies that were made for each other.

Sendible and Bundle Post are going to be conducting a first ever joint webinar. The free webinar will show how one of the top social media dashboards and the only social content management system work together to make social media marketing efforts more effective, efficient and profitable.

The Sendible dashboard delivers a powerful platform for engaging with customers, measuring results and monitoring your brand across multiple social media channels at once. The solution expands multi-channel, accounts and team management beyond other platforms with broader features. Sendible tracks your social media account activity and reports on a broad range of metrics including analytics, fans/followers, clicks, traffic, engagement, sentiment and more.

By combining the scalable Sendible social media management platform with the patent pending content aggregation, curation, scheduling, hashtagging and marketing efficiencies of Bundle Post, many social media marketers and brands are able to reduce the number of tools they use, cut the time they spend managing their social media efforts and more importantly improve their results in dramatic ways.

On March 19th, Sendible and Bundle Post will be doing a live joint webinar showing the complementary technologies and how they work together to get you better results in less time. Click Here to register for the webinar. Space is limited!