The Executive Suite: Three Things You Should Do in Social Media (and Why)

Listen, Collaborate, Measure

Three words, simple in concept yet difficult in practice. When we talk about blogging and making relationships through collaborations the core of social media requires a better understanding of social technologies. It’s nearly the reverse of traditional marketing.

Where traditional marketing and planning starts with a message for the target audience, social media begins about what the consumer and your audience is saying about your brand. This stands in contrast to prescribing and directing a message with the intention to persuade people and drive conversion. Taken together, listening, collaboration and measuring creates the overall basis for the highest required conversions for a blog.

Below are three concepts that you should include in your social business program. Have a look:

1. Listening and Responding Intelligently
It’s one of the measurable connections between you and your marketplace, a direct link to your customer. Listening is a core skill of any communication process. Right? Listening to what the user is actually saying and measuring both the subject and the source, will enable you to initiate a sensible conversation.

Many bloggers believe that the process of listening should be built around paying attention to the conversation and then responding on the basis of strategy and measurement. Listening is important for you to understand what to do and why you should do that on web. Integrating a listening program in your social media can do wonders because it will provide the intelligence you need to put blog conversations to work.

For example using social share buttons for your blog posts enables content sharing. This encourages engagement on your blog. Reviews, comments, and recommendations are the first things to display to a customer in a marketplace. These are important because they precisely inform the consumer on how to make smarter choice before buying a product or consuming a piece of information.

Creating a baseline: There are generally no metrics to answer questions like “How much conversion one should expect?” or “How many negative posts are bad?” Therefore, it’s always recommended to establish your own baseline, and build your social strategy out of that.

Finding your influencers: Diving deep into conversations to find out who is participating in a conversation is important to determine out what is actually being said. For example, in PR you connect with media persons, journalists, analysts and so on because these are the people sitting on the entry points to launch you to a bigger and wider audience. The most challenging aspect is that literally anyone can be an influencer.

2. Encouraging Collaboration Everywhere
Collaborative activities always grab the top spot in an engagement process. Moving your customers and readers is a “must do” in your marketing plan. A basic structure that you should follow to drive engagement to your blog is:

1. Defining objectives
2. Listening
3. Organizing
4. Engaging and
5. Measuring

Being an active part of any conversation is all about telling that you are part of a larger community, and telling that you appreciate it. This level of engagement will itself bring in higher levels of loyal engagement. People in a community truly value a sense of belonging and promoting that can give you all the fruits of social media on one plate.

No matter what social network you are using to connect with people, all that matters is that they really want to know what is happening around a brand. On Facebook, people are sharing more personal stuff than ever before, which clearly shows that people are in need of personalized and shareable content.

3. Measuring Social Media
The final thing you should do is measuring your efforts over social media for your business. It’s important because it is the key to understand how effective your marketing strategy is and can be. Social media today can be and should be measured without fail.

Calculating your reach as a blogger, the number of comments on a post or how many times people shared your content can be easily done. Making measurement an important part of your social business plan is “must do”

When measuring your blog’s analytics you’ll encounter data in an unstructured way. Social media analytics tools provide a much needed thrust to sort out this unstructured data.

Linking Social Analytics With Business Analytics
It’s always recommended and very important to connect your social analytics with business analytics. Blog posts, comments, and video posts tend to share what happened when a brand was being measured in terms of social media engagement. These things will help you create a better social media strategy. Also, they can be used as a guide to respond to a negative comment. Also, a social media platform can be used as a feedback system which can collect comments to keep your blog on track.

It’s simple. You do it one way, people will respond in one way. You do it in a different way, people will respond in a different way.