However, there could be a better method than influencer marketing. Brand advocacy is something similar but differs in a couple of ways from influencer marketing. 

What is a brand advocate? 

Brand advocates, unlike influencers, are genuine users or customers of your business. A relationship with an influencer is a clear transaction. You pay them and they promote your business. With a brand advocate, it isn’t necessarily about the money.  

Brand advocates are already customers of your business who are happy to tell others about their experience.  

How can brand advocates benefit your business? 

Brand advocates and influencers are effective marketing tools because they offer personalised recommendations to others. People are far more likely to use a product or service if it has been recommended to them by someone trustworthy.  

However, we’ve got to the point where even influencers are seen with a certain level of scepticism. We all know how it works now and so the recommendation will always feel a bit less than genuine.  

With brand advocates, as these are already customers with real experiences, the recommendation holds a bit more weight.  

Where can you find a brand advocate? 

Customer details 

The first stop to find a brand advocate is to dive into your customer data. If you have salespeople, you should speak with them to find customers who are especially happy with the service and then contact them yourself to ask for a review.  

Customer reviews 

If someone leaves glowing feedback about your business, it could be worth approaching them over a brand advocate deal. In some cases you can even find customers with negative reviews, resolve them and hopefully turn them into happy customers.  

Social media 

It’s definitely worth keeping an eye on your social media accounts to try and identify potential brand partners. Is there someone who regularly interacts with your posts or shares them a lot? Perhaps they would be willing to help you promote your business a little more. 

How do you approach a potential brand advocate? 

The first step is to make a personal connection. If you’ve found them on social media, spend some time responding to their messages or send them a direct message thanking them for the support.  

Sometimes an upfront email is best. Make sure you say you’re grateful for the support or customer reviews and ask them how they feel about becoming a brand advocate. 

Even if a brand advocate is happy to give you a shoutout on Twitter, it’s nice to offer them something in return for their time. Perhaps a freebie or a discount on future purchases could be a way to say thank you. 

When to use brand advocates 

If you have a couple of interested people on board, the next step is to integrate them into your marketing. Ways you can get the most out of your brand advocates include: 

Deals and discounts 

If you are running a discount on purchases, reach out to your brand advocates to let them know and ask them to share it with people they know or on social media. This will benefit the brand advocate because they can get some money off and it will also benefit those they share it with. 

Free samples 

If you sell products, give your brand advocates a freebie which they will hopefully share their experiences over social media or on a blog or Youtube channel if they have one.  

Working with a brand advocate doesn’t have to be overly complicated but it’s important not to ask for too much. You can’t expect them to spend too much time promoting your business for you but every little shoutout or retweet helps. 

Have you ever used a brand advocate or influencer marketing? What was your experience like? Let us know your thoughts below.  

The post What Are Brand Advocates and How Can They Help Your Business?  appeared first on My Digital Wirral.

If you’ve even had an inkling to Google marketing these days, you’ll know it’s all about influencers. Bloggers, vloggers, Instagrammers, Tik-Tok celebrities and micro influencers. It’s enough to leave any small business owner baffled.

So where should you begin if you want to start influencer marketing? Well first, let me tell you why it’s important that you consider it as part of your strategy.

What is Influencer Marketing?

It used to be all about bloggers, but now many people who blogged have migrated to platforms like Instragram and YouTube, and are producing more visual content that keeps their fans hooked. With large fan bases, they hold a great captive audience for your brand, and if you do your research, you’ll find influencers who hold your exact target market.

Influencers can be expensive to work with if you’re aiming for the top, but there are plenty of influencers to choose from for every budget and niche topic.

Where To Begin

Starting up with influencer marketing can feel like reaching out to a local celebrity – just a bit intimidating! However, remember that brand collaborations are an influencer’s bread and butter, they’ll be more than happy to hear from you, just remember these key tips!

• Never ask an influencer to work for free or for exposure. Some will be happy to work in exchange for free products, but it tends to be smaller, start-up influencers who will do this.
• Some influencers will accept free products in exchange for a review, but be wary, they will be honest!
• Try to work with influencers that you actually follow and engage with, you need to have a good idea of their personality and community. Don’t spread the net far and wide, be targeted.
• Decide whether you should work with local influencers or national ones initially. A local influencer with 5000 followers may be able to generate more targeted sales for you than a national influencer with 100,000 followers.

We know we said no one works for free, but if you’re feeling chancy, some vloggers do have a PO box that you can send your products to. This usually only works if your product would make good content, and there is no guarantee that the influencer will mention your brand at all. You may even get a bad review, so use this method with extreme caution!

Step One – Do Your Research

First thing’s first, decide which social media platform your target market is on. Influencer marketing might not be right for every business, but it might surprise you; there are even business influencers on LinkedIn.

Once you’ve honed in, use your business social accounts to follow plenty of influencers and make some notes on your initial favourites. Don’t be put off by smaller followings, check how engaged their audience is instead. See if they’ve done other collaborations in the past and see if you can see the results – did anyone mention the brand in the comments?

If you’re looking on Youtube watch their latest videos and their most viewed videos, Google them too and check they haven’t had any negative press in the past.

Step Two – Get Networking

Use your social account to comment, like and generally interact with your favourite influencers, you’ll start to be known in their mind and it will give you a better bargaining position. You might even learn something about the influencer you can use to create the perfect collaboration opportunity.

Not only that, some influencers get hundreds of emails a day – it can be hard to stand out! If you personalise your outreach email with comments like “I saw your latest opinion on X and thought maybe you would be interested in…” or “I know how much you love X so I wondered if you might like…”, you’re going to come off as more memorable and personable.

You might even find the influencer has already reviewed a competitor and isn’t a fan, or that they’re running a series covering a topic close to your business soon.

Step Three – Set a Budget, a Contract and Clear Terms

I remember my first influencer marketing mistake – I had just sent one of my favourite Instagrammers a dress from my boutique. She took some fantastic photos and tagged me, but she also tagged the brand that I bought the dresses wholesale from. This might seem great at first, but actually a lot of the exposure I paid for was going straight to the bigger brand, rather than to my small boutique. Combat this sort of thing by being clear from the start with how you want your item promoted.

You can certainly dictate things you don’t want an influencer to say if you’re paying for the exposure, but bear in mind most operate an ethical policy, and if you get too strict your plans might backfire and result in negative publicity. Honest reviews sell better than those that sound overly fake anyway, and might offer some valuable insight for your product development.

Make sure you’re both clear on budget and sign a contract to indicate this too, especially important if you’re planning on working together long term. You can even set a clause to break the contract if the results you expected aren’t met.

Many influencers will have a media kit available that details results of past campaigns, so make sure you ask for this.

Step Four – Interact and Engage With the Campaign

When your campaign goes live, be on hand to answer any questions the influencer’s fan’s might have. Stick around in the comments sections and be useful, offer links, sizing advice, product specifications and more, but never respond to trolls!

If there is criticism of your brand, reply professionally if you feel you need to, but avoid causing any aggro in the influencer’s comments section, this may make them avoid working with you again.

Step Five – Measure Those Results!

The golden rule is not to measure your campaign on likes on the influencer’s piece of content. An Instagram post you’ve collaborated on may get 10,000 likes, but you can’t be sure people aren’t just liking the post because they’re a fan of the account. At the end of the day, you’re here for ROI.

There are a few ways you can measure results from an influencer marketing campaign, try these:

Offer an Exclusive Discount Code

For places like Youtube and Instagram where you can’t always place a clickable link right in the content, you can instead offer a discount code. It won’t give you the full picture, but you’ll be able to track an influencers… influence? by seeing how many of your site visitors utilise that particular discount code. This can also be set up to track multiple campaigns – set up a unique code for each influencer you work with and you’ll be able to see who just gets likes, and who actually gets results.

Set Up a Tracking Link

This is easy to do with link shorteners like Bit.Ly, but if you’re going to really track results get a dedicated Google analytics tracking code and integrate that into your shortened link. You can set these up to track exactly where the traffic came from and from which influencer – there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube.

Set Up an Affiliates Scheme

If an influencer is just being paid on exposure and clicks they’re not necessarily results driven, however, if they earn a commission on every sale there’s a lot more reason to push your product and rave about it. There are plenty of plugins and services online that will let you set up affiliate marketing schemes, so you can reward the influencers with the best results, not just the best following.

And Don’t Forget!

Working with influencers is just one stage of the marketing funnel, make sure you make those links go to a killer landing page where you can capture leads, share curated products related to the campaign and offer other incentives to turn new customers into loyal returning customers.

Convinced influencer marketing is right for your brand? Keep checking back as we’re working on a North-West guide to local influencers! 

The post How To Work With Influencers appeared first on My Digital Wirral.

You only need to take a peek at social media to see hundreds of small businesses are struggling with the Coronavirus pandemic. With governments advising everyone to stay indoors, many businesses have immediately lost access to their key customers.

However, adversity often encourages innovation, and we’re delighted to have seen so many Wirral businesses rising to the challenge and adapting their business.

From setting up online shops to quickly creating local delivery services, businesses have striven to offer some extremely tempting options to those in isolation.

One thing is certainly clear, having a digital strategy with your business is essential to making it bulletproof in the face of a crisis. That’s why we’ve listed below some ideas you can work on while you’re on lock-down.

Have a Bank of Digital Products

When we first saw gatherings of people limited by COVID-19, we saw many businesses adapt by offering a local delivery service instead. This worked well until the next stage of restrictions – as of the time of writing this post, all non-essential reasons for leaving the home are banned. The people of the UK can only leave the house for food shopping, medical reasons and exercise once a day.

This means many businesses lost access to their delivery infrastructure – so what’s next you ask? Digital products that’s what!

Some businesses that are booming right now include fitness instructors, who have adapted to offering their services streamed online in exchange for a subscription fee.

People are desperate for entertainment at home; just look at how well streaming services like Disney+ and gaming providers are doing.

Ask yourself; can you turn your product digital? Create an online lesson, a printable, a downloadable workbook, the options are quite diverse!

Create an Online Store and Streamline Shipping

Many businesses still think an online store isn’t viable due to the cost, but did you know some online stores such as Spotify can cost as little as $30 a month?

Another option is to whip up an eBay or Etsy store, these are completely free to set up, and just charge you a fee per purchase. They don’t look as visually appealing, but if you’re after something temporary, you can trial things here.

Ensure your store is always stocked with the supplies needed for shipping. You’ll need envelopes, mailing bags, stamps, protective packaging and a printer that can handle all those labels. Do your research in advance to make sure you know how much to charge for shipping.

For many small businesses, there is an opportunity to ship items out with just one worker, which is great for isolation, just ensure your customers understand expected shipping times.

Have a Back-Up Local Delivery Plan

If you’re a restaurant or similar eatery, maybe consider having takeaway packaging (you can get environmentally friendly types now!) stockpiled. This means you can still generate some cash flow should your business premises have to close.

This isn’t just great for viral pandemics, it’s also really useful if you can’t open your seating area for any other reason, such as a heating fault or flood.

Keep a record of who on your team has a vehicle that can be set up with business-use insurance, and adapt as needed.

Think Like a Content Creator

How many famous influencers do you know of who never seem to leave the house? Twitch streamers, Youtube gamers, fashion bloggers, they’re all able to create digital content and monetise it without a physical product.

Creating content such as Youtube videos, an Instagram Feed or a TikTok will give you a fantastic opportunity to market your business to your customers, and if you’ve already spent some time growing it, it’s there to see you through when you need to focus more time on the digital side.

You can monetise content in a variety of ways such as with ad revenue, but Patreon is a favourite of many creatives. It allows your fans to pay a subscription fee to access your exclusive content.

Create a Passive Income With Your Blog (And Help Your SEO While You’re At It!)

Blogs that sit on your ecommerce store’s website are beneficial in a multitude of ways, just read The Beginner’s Guide to SEO and you’ll soon understand why digital marketeers are always shouting ‘content is king!’.

If your blog becomes successful in your small business’ niche, it offers a lot of potential to be a passive income generator for your business.

What is passive income you ask? Well it’s simply income that requires a set up, but minimal maintenance.

For example, you could write a blog article that’s gaining some serious traction and doing well on Google – perhaps you could link a useful related digital download to that successful blog? Many readers are likely to pay for it if you price it right, and if you set up the correct automation to deliver the product, you really don’t need much input.

Having something like this optimised can be a real lifesaver for paying your bills if a different income stream for your business dries up.

Have All Social Media Ready To Go

Your business, at its physical premises, might be so busy you’ve never really paid much heed to social media. A common misconception after all, is that businesses who aren’t aimed at Millennials and Gen X don’t need an active presence on social. This couldn’t be further from the truth!

Social Media sites such as Facebook and Instagram have been lifesavers for many businesses struggling with COVID-19 uncertainty. They allow you to keep your customers informed and aware of the latest developments. They’re also great for taking orders over if you haven’t yet set up a shop – did you know Instagram has a function where you can shop products featured in posts?

Keep Important Business Data On The Cloud

There are plenty of disasters that could lead to you being unable to access your business premises safely, so increasingly businesses are choosing to move important information such as sales data, inventory management and day-to-day operations to the cloud.

Cloud based businesses were able to swiftly move to a home-based working situation as soon as we went on COVID lock-down with minimal disruption to their services.

You can go as simple as keeping your spreadsheets on Google Drive to being a little more high-tech with having your entire EPOS system integrated with your online sales. Either way, we think it will make your life a lot easier.

—

What was your digital lifesaver during the COVID crisis?

The post How To Make Your Small Business Bulletproof – Lessons From COVID-19 appeared first on My Digital Wirral.

LinkedIn brands itself as a ‘business and employment-orientated service’ and quickly evolved into the ‘world’s largest professional network’ so there has always been more slack allowed for this greyscale platform. However, more vibrant and diverse sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are only just beginning to get the validity they deserve.

Of course, there are always employees who take advantage of permission to access social media during work hours – that’s what your Social Media Policy is for – but restricting activity on account of the minority could almost definitely be detrimental to the productivity and morale of your majority.

The advantages of using social media at work

At My Digital Wirral, it’s in our nature to champion the benefits of social media but we think there’s still work to be done in convincing those from more corporate industries that using social media at work doesn’t always constitute skiving.

Here are some interesting stats from a study by Pew Internet on what staff use social media for during the working day.

• 34% use social media to take a mental break
• 24% use it to build or nurture professional connections
• 20% use it as a source of information to solve problems at work
• 78% find social media helpful in sourcing new business opportunities and making new connections.

With all of that in mind, we’ve put together some of the main benefits of permitting social media use in the office…

Fosters a culture of trust – Being given access to social media during work hours makes staff feel like their employer trusts them and nurtures healthy colleague relationships.

A great way to attract and retain young talent – You don’t need us to tell you that young people love their social media, so enabling them to access their treasured profiles throughout the day will no doubt prove to be an attractive work perk.

A more constructive use of downtime – Staff are going to time waste and take breaks; scrolling through social media is surely more productive than standing outside with a cigarette or passing the time gossiping at the kettle.

Social media is modern day’s search engine – With improved search functionalities, social platforms are now the preferred search engine for many modern users.

Checking up on social media during the day also ensures staff stay in the loop with trending topics and breaking news which is particularly crucial for reactive marketing strategies.

Now we want to hear from you… Are you a business owner who believes access to social media would just create unnecessary distraction? Or are you an employee who agrees with the advantages we’ve outlined above? Whatever your stance, share your thoughts in the comments section below or tweet us @MyDigitalWirral.

The post The Benefits of Permitting Social Media Access at Work appeared first on My Digital Wirral.

You might want to increase your number of followers, encourage engagement or to grow the number of people heading through to the website – or most likely you want to do all three!

It can be difficult to take it one step at a time and focus on just one of the above, so the best thing to do is look at which one will have the most impact overall.

The answer? Undoubtedly your Twitter engagement.

An increase in engagement allows for even more interaction from other users, which subsequently means more people coming through to your profile and potentially clicking through to your website.

Twitter engagement is also important for raising your brand awareness as you’re then able to appear in more people’s timelines in general.

With all this in mind, you may want to take on board some of the following points about how you can increase your Twitter engagement and give your brand a nudge in the right direction.

1. Engage with other content

On social, you need to take the mentality of ‘scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’.

Twitter is a community and like in any other community, you should always treat those how you want to be treated.

That means engaging with others when they post about something you find interesting, or about something that you think you can add value to.

It could be a like, retweet or a comment – either way you’ll be helping someone out, which will work out in your favour when it comes to sharing your own content.

2. Avoid rambling tweets

Twitter’s maximum tweet limit might have increased to 280 characters, but that doesn’t you have to fill it all of the time.

While you can post longer tweets if necessary, one of the things users like about Twitter is the brevity of content – and shorter, easier to digest tweets are always preferable as a result.

Try to say what you need to in a minimum of characters, rather than adding on words simply because you now can.

3. Always respond to people

If someone tweets at you, you should reply. This is an effective way of putting across your brand and increasing awareness as well as showing you have time for those who have questions.

Failing to respond to someone who speaks to you can mean you come across as ignorant or simply unresponsive, which won’t win you any favours in terms of customer service.

4. Seek out your stats

There are some questions you should automatically ask when you’re managing a Twitter account.

When are your peak hours? What retweets have garnered the best response in the past? Is there are format that’s most popular with your followers?

Finding out the answers to these questions can put you on the path for Twitter engagement success, especially if you use the data to your advantage.

Make use of Twitter analytics to see where you’re going wrong and where you can improve. Then use this information to your advantage!

5. Try out ads

Once you’ve experimented with organic posts and have a firm footing on knowing what posts will garner a good amount of engagement, you can go one step further and try out Twitter Ads.

These obviously cost you more than working organically but can help give you that much-needed boost when required.

6. Add value

One of the most important points to take away from this list is that whatever you’re posting, you need to ensure you’re adding value to the platform.

This is true of any social media strategy, but when you’re looking to increase engagement it’s especially important.

Do thorough research of what other companies post and what gets good engagement. Usually they have their own original personality and way of responding, which is often more colloquial than you would expect.

7. Don’t inundate your followers

When you’re on Twitter it can be tempting to schedule as many posts as possible so that you’re reaching as many people as you can.

While posting at regular intervals is certainly recommended to keep your page visible, posting incessantly is not.

This can simply irritate your followers – they don’t want to follow you exclusively, they simply want to hear when you have something of interest to say.

8. Use Twitter’s features

Don’t use Twitter simply for the sake of it. Other users will soon see through this and drop off quickly.

Instead, make use of everything they offer, including the features you might not have considered before.

Social platforms often introduce new features in efforts to bring people to their platform, which can be a great way to encourage engagement. For instance, using the poll feature can help you hear the thoughts of your followers as they don’t have to go to the trouble of writing a reply.

9. Make use of hashtags

Hashtags are an integral part of Twitter. They define the platform and have really made it what it is today. That’s why you should include them in every tweet you write.

By doing this you’re able to gain a wider audience for your tweet. As long as you use a relevant hashtag these will be people who are looking for content similar to that which you’re posting.

10. Share videos and photos

A huge point of engagement on any social platform is videos and photos.

Video content is without doubt the future of news and media and the same goes for businesses looking to share posts.

Not only is a video more likely to be watched than other content, but they’re also more likely to be reacted to. Something this visual encourages people to respond and interact as it’s often more emotive.

What tricks do you use to increase your Twitter engagement? Drop us a comment in the section below.

The post 10 Ways to Increase Your Business’ Twitter Engagement appeared first on My Digital Wirral.

Despite the other issues juggling for your attention, you should still focus on creating a Twitter presence. This will help you in the long run even if there doesn’t seem to be an immediate pay-off.

Here are some step-by-step tips to help you get your Twitter strategy off to a great start.

1. Kickstart your profile

If you haven’t already, you’ll need to optimise your Twitter profile. This will give your profile authority and make it friendlier to search engines, so people are easily able to come across your profile.

To do this you should first upload a good quality profile picture, preferably of your company logo if you have one as this will help people recognise your brand. You should optimise your Twitter bio with keywords that explain concisely the mission of your business – you can include hashtags here too.

You should also make use of your cover photo and pinned tweet. There are fewer hard and fast rules surrounding these, and you may want to update them regularly with any relevant dates or activities or any causes you’re promoting.

2. Be active

After you’ve kitted out your profile with the essentials, you should make the most of your Twitter profile right away. While you don’t want to inundate your followers with tweets, you should keep your profile active with regular posts.

These don’t have to declare your latest sales all the time. You can share content you find online that’s relevant to your business and put your own opinion on it, or ask your followers for theirs.

You can also tweet out your own content that’s uploaded to your website blog. Rather than just sharing the link you should intro it in an interesting way that will make your followers want to read on. DO this on a regular basis to encourage engagement and increase the likelihood of your tweets being seen.

3. Follow relevant people

Of course, there’s no point in tweeting if you’ve got no one following you! To get yourself on the radar of people and businesses, begin by following people in your industry.

After you’ve made some initial follows you should begin to see an increase in other people following you. While this may not seem like a significant amount, it’s a start to growing your audience.

Some people make an effort to follow everyone who follows them, which may seem like a friendly thing to do. In reality your Twitter feed will become inundated with tweets that aren’t interesting or relevant.

Keep it in order by just following those who will add value to your timeline. This will help you avoid falling out of love with Twitter later down the line.

4. Use hashtags

Hashtags, used in the right way, can be the key to increasing your tweet reach, engaging users and increasing your followers – all in one go.

However, it’s easy to fall into bad hashtag habits. Rather than posting a hashtag as every other word, you should restrict just how many you use. You should also avoid using hashtags within a tweet. Instead aim to tag them onto the end, after you’ve got the point across. For example:

‘Struggling to get your Twitter strategy up to speed? Here we explain 5 simple steps to success #digitalstrategy #socialmedia’

Rather than:

‘Struggling to get your #Twitter #strategy up to speed? Here we explain 5 simple steps to #success’

This allows you to target more specifically and makes your tweet easier to read.

5. Never miss an opportunity

The last step in improving your Twitter strategy is to make the most of it. Twitter runs on reactions to the latest news as well as people’s thoughts and opinions, which is why you should have your finger on the pulse and keep up to date with the latest industry news.

This way you’ll easily be able to jump in on the conversation – having your Twitter notifications enabled on your phone can also help here.

You can use this in conjunction with your normal tweets and save yourself time by scheduling the ones you want to post anyway – this way you’re not compromising your content.

What tips and tricks do you use to help engage your Twitter followers? Share them in the comment section below!

The post 5 Effortless Steps to Improving Your Twitter Strategy appeared first on My Digital Wirral.

While everyone who likes one of your tweets won’t always head straight to your site and purchase your product or services, it doesn’t mean you should give up on your business’ social media.

There is, after all, a lot more to it than simply appealing to potential customers.

A large chunk of customer experience now takes place on social media and how you portray your brand can have a massive effect on its success.

To make sure you’re approaching your social strategy in the right way here are some tips on how you can get the most out of social analytics.

1. Get the right kit

While you might monitor how many likes, shares and comments your posts have by checking your notifications, it’s not enough to base a comprehensive social media strategy on.

Instead you’ll need to take a look at some social media analytics tools which will be able to give you a more rounded and accurate overview of your social activity.

If you’re looking to get a taste of what analytics entail, you’ll want to take a look at the platform’s analytics tools. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Linkedin all have their own analytics tools which you can view. These monitor the success of your posts by letting you know how many people they’ve reached and how much engagement they’ve received.

From this you can then learn about the best performing content, what posting times are popular in your industry and what types of post garner the best reaction.

To see these analytics on Facebook head to Insights. From here you can view actions on your page, page previews, page views, page likes and post engagements, as well as many other analytics.

Likewise on Twitter, simply head to Profile and settings (top right) and choose Analytics.

While these platform analytics can be useful for a snapshot of how your posts are performing on that specific channel, for those looking for a more in depth overview a different option might suit you better. Social media management tools import data from all of your social media channels and provide you with one report and all the information you need.

Here are just some of the social media management tools you could find useful:

• Hootsuite
• Buffer
• IFTTT
• Sprout Social

Bear in mind that this isn’t an extensive list – there are plenty of others out there to try, so don’t be afraid to have a sniff round for the best solution for you.

2. Know your terminology

While you might want to see the numbers go up every month, there’s a lot more work to it than that – and that work involves knowing exactly what you’re talking about.

There are several social media related terms that will help you better understand how you can continue to grow your social media platforms. The majority of these terms are all the metrics that measure the success of your content, which is why they’re worth knowing.

Conversions: This is a rather loose term as you can bend it to be relevant to any call of action you’re seeking. Essentially, a conversion is when a user takes a desired action on one of your social media profiles. This might be commenting on a Facebook post or retweeting a tweet – it’s defined by whatever you want it to mean. It could even be heading to your site and buying a product, it’s completely flexible.

Reach: As mentioned previously, the reach of a post is how many people have viewed it (usually organically). This can be monitored per post, although the overall reach is the size of audience you’re able to communicate with in general.

Engagement: Engagement is simply the number of interactions you have on your posts, such as likes, shares, comments or retweets. The higher the engagement, the higher your reach is likely to be.

Referral traffic: When looking at your website’s Google Analytics, you will be able to view referral traffic. Under this section you can see how many people have clicked through to your website from various social channels. This comes in very handy when you’re looking to tailor your social strategy to boost one platform in particular.

3. Work on one strategy at a time

It can be tempting to immediately sign up to all the social media platforms and hope to boost them all in one go to give your website the best possible start it can have. However, while this might sound like the ideal solution, it’s not a realistic one.

Instead you should focus your marketing efforts on one social media platform at a time. That doesn’t mean you should only post on one platform at a time, but you should focus your extra energy on getting one platform to the best it can be.

It’s also important to only sign up to the social sites that you think are particularly relevant to your company. How many dog groomers should have a LinkedIn account? And how many IT specialists need an Instagram? Only create a social profile if you’re bringing something to the platform, rather than for the sake of it.

4. Focus on organic first

It can be tempting on set up to throw some money into your social strategy to get the ball rolling. However, in order to make the most of your social media analytics, allow some time to get used to the organic side of things.

Working organically will help you get an oversight of how to best read the analytics and get everything you can from them.

Once you’ve got to grips with this there’s no reason you shouldn’t inject a bit of cash into your Facebook posts and sponsor the important ones. With all that extra analytics knowledge, you’ll be able to spend it wisely, after all.

5. Learn from your mistakes

Analytics is all about finding the best balance of posts and learning what works. To figure this out, however, you also need to learn what doesn’t work. This means taking a bad post on the chin and making a note that it’s not right for that platform, at that time.

It’s worth testing this out on a different platform or at varying times to make sure it’s the type of post and not the content itself that fails to encourage engagement.

However, once you’ve done this don’t be afraid to simply let it go. Instead you need to focus on what is working and question why. Comparing posts with good engagement and reach against those with bad engagement and reach will be invaluable when you’re forming your social media strategy in the future.

Do you make the most from your social analytics? What strategies do you find useful? Leave a comment in the section below or get in touch over on Twitter.

The post 5 Tips on Using Social Analytics: How to Get the Most from Your Data appeared first on My Digital Wirral.

However, there’s a lot more to social media than first meets the eye.

This isn’t simply a space for you to shout about your business and everything it does, although that does play a small role. In fact often, the more subtle about your own business you can be, the more likely you will be to reach new potential customers and increase your sales.

The more you do shout about your own business, the more you’ll appear as greedy with no intention of adding value to the platform you’re hollering on. Instead, take a measured approach to your social media strategy in order to get the most from it.

Here’s just how you can use social media not just to market your product, but to share your brand’s mission.

Raise brand awareness

How you present your business on social media will impact how people view your brand. This will send a strong message, which is why you shouldn’t hastily create your Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Before hitting Sign Up, write down your business’ mission statement and make a list of all the connotations you think would naturally come from this. This list of words will be the bones of your social media strategy, upon which all your other decisions are made.

What does your brand stand for? Are there causes that you want to fight for or messages you want to see heard? Share these on social to raise your brand awareness and in turn find customers who share the same values.

Share behind the scenes

Take this opportunity to show your customers a peek behind the curtain of your business. This transparency will encourage customers to view your company as fair, honest and reliable.

While you may think that pushing your sales and discounts on your social will get the message seen, people are far more likely to respond to a tactic that isn’t quite so ‘in your face’.

Instead, they’ll be more willing to interact with a company that’s laid back and realistic, after all not everyone will want to buy your services.

Show off your customer service skills

Social media is a space for you to engage with customers and your response to queries can be the most important aspect of how your brand is perceived.

That’s why you should be on top form when it comes to answering questions, and make sure you don’t say anything that you wouldn’t say to a customer’s face!

Both speed and how helpful a reply is are factors here, so make sure you’re quick of the mark to provide a useful answer.

Be on the ball

Social media is up to date with the latest events, changing every minute as the news is reported. That’s why you should make an effort to keep on top of what’s happening and chime in when it’s relevant.

You can respond to issues you feel strongly about and that represent your brand, but make sure you’re not just jumping on the bandwagon because everyone else is talking about something.

Monitor what’s working

The beauty of using social media to increase your brand awareness and engage with customers is that you’re able to see how much of that converts into leads and subsequently, sales.

While you won’t get sales from every like, follow or share, you should see a correlation in your increased popularity online and the number of people clicking through to your website.

Keep an eye on what posts are popular and what isn’t. This way you can help improve your social strategy and continue to push those conversions.

How does your social strategy look? What changes will you be implementing to increase your engagement and increase your brand awareness? Leave a comment below or come and join the conversation over on Twitter.

The post Why Social Media Isn’t Just a Marketing Tool appeared first on My Digital Wirral.