“Social media doesn’t work for me.”
Did you decide to use social media marketing to grow your business, get more leads, grow brand awareness, etc. but aren’t meeting those goals?
Like anything else, once you set up your social media accounts, you can’t simply set them and forget them. Every once in awhile you need to review your accounts and marketing strategy. Here are a few things to audit and revise if social media isn’t working for you.
Complete an Audit
First thing, take an inventory of all your social media accounts and check:
- how much growth you’ve seen on each profile (increase in followers)
- how much engagement you receive on each platform (shares, likes, comments)
- how much website traffic you receive from each platform (using Google Analytics)
- how many new leads you receive from social media (this one can be trickier to track, but simply ask.)
- how often you are posting
- that all your links work, as well as your contact form on your website, is working
Now, why do you want to do this? And isn’t this a lot of work?
You want to check to make sure that the profiles you’re using are actually growing and are effective. And by determining platforms that aren’t working well for you, you can take a good long look at if you should even be using it (which ultimately can save you time).
Optimize Your Profiles
Just like you tidy your home or service your car, you need to optimize your social media profiles to ensure they are complete, current and fresh.
- When was the last time you updated your Facebook cover photo?
- Is your cover photo really mobile friendly?
- Are your Facebook page tabs organized for easy navigation?
Check out this Twitter Optimization Checklist I created that you can repurpose for most platforms.
It’s a good idea to freshen up your profile images and header images and pin new relevant posts to the top of your profile. You might also want to create some new graphics in case you’ve been reusing older graphics.
Consider Your Content
Although you’ve already completed an audit, take a look at the content you are posting on social media. Does it truly appeal to your audience?
Who are you speaking to?
There’s a chance that when you first started your profiles your audience was a specific demographic (mostly women, 25-35, living in United States for example), but that could have changed. Take a look at your analytics and consider doing a quick survey to see who your audience actually is. You may be surprised.
What are you posting?
Do you create content that you think your audience will like, or that you like?
Make sure to create content for your audience. So whether that’s videos, blogs or simply the posts you create, post with your audience in mind. Check back through your analytics to see what posts worked the best and try more of those.
Test different posts, graphics, and test different lengths of posts. Maybe right now you are posting short sentences on Facebook with an image and linking back to your website. However, it’s possible that your audience doesn’t want to leave Facebook to read your blog, so put the majority of the blog post directly on Facebook and see how they react.
Always be trying new things and testing to see what might work even better for you.
When are you posting?
The time of day (or day itself) could be one reason you aren’t getting any engagement. Again, look at your analytics to see if you can spot a pattern of when your audience is online and the most popular posts.
For many of the accounts that I manage, 8-9PM at night is when most people are online. However, try posting at 7PM so that when your audience is online they potentially could see your content first.
Check your social media analytics to see when your audience is online and when to post
When your social media efforts aren’t working, it’s tempting to just throw in the towel. However, building up a good, strong network online take just as long as offline efforts. Try to be patient and celebrate the little wins like increased engagement, or a share of one of your posts.
Want more ways to improve your social media marketing efforts? Here is a free PDF download to improve your profiles.
I am not sure the place you are getting your information, however good topic. I needs to spend some time studying more or understanding more. Thank you for wonderful information I was in search of this info for my mission.
Glad to hear the info was useful! Where I get my information- I read a lot from different blogs, like Peg Fitzpatrick and Melyssa Griffin, watch videos and live shows like Social Media Examiner, and Jasmine Star, read business and marketing books, etc. I listen to a lot of podcasts too, Amy Porterfield has a great one, Marketing School, the Gary Vee Audio Experience. I try to attend great confereneces too like Social Media Marketing World 🙂