ANALYZE YOUR SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT
The third, and final, phase of conducting a social media audit is to take a look at who and what is around you in the social media realm. A Social Environment Profile will help you identify key competitive threats; new opportunities for market expansion; and the best tools and tactics to maximize your social media marketing efforts. It can provide you with information on what your competitors are doing online: where they exist and meet with potential customers, what potential and existing customer attraction and engagement strategies they use, and how successful they are at implementing social media marketing. In addition to looking at your competitors, a Social Environment Profile should include identifying and profiling key influencers in your industry or target markets. To complete the picture, we suggest staying up-to-date on best practices in social media, as well as on the most current social media tools available.
Identify and Analyze Your Online Competition
Begin building profiles on your competitors by identifying businesses that compete for the business of your key online customer segments. Remember, depending on the nature of your business, your competition could exist down the street or halfway around the world
You should have already identified your Key Customer Segments if you have implemented the suggestions we made in our blog post "Building a Social Media Strategy. Step 2: Create a Social Customer Profile." You can also see an example of a Social Customer Profile on our website.
How can you identify your online competition? Conduct Google, Facebook and Twitter searches on keywords for your industry and see what companies pop up in the results. These are likely to be your key competitors. As a next step, we recommend setting up a spreadsheet matrix analysis that contains key variables that can be tracked for each competitor. For example, you might want to track the following:
- rankings for keywords that are important to your SEO efforts
- social media posting frequency
- current contests and ads
- # of mentions for competitors in social media
Once the spreadsheet is developed, it’s time to set up a monitoring system. This can include using social monitoring tools (free or otherwise), setting up keyword searches, following competitors on the various social media platforms, etc. Social Media Biz published an informative article rating the tools that you can use to monitor our competitors at
Build a Network with Key Industry Influencers
In order to maximize social media ROI, it’s important to interact with those in your industry who have the greatest reach. Remevber, a smaller network of effective influencers can be more powerful than a large number of followers who add little social media value. Who are the key people that extend our social media network? They are the members of the social media realm who participate actively and add good content to the online community.
How do you find key influencers? You must understand the different types of influencers if you hope to identify those who can maximize your influence. Influencers can be divided into categories that correspond with the influence they exact on their surrounding networks.
Expert Influencer—is an authority in a certain subject who people look to for information, advice, and guidance. Experts carry a lot of weight when it comes to influencing the decisions of those in their networks.
Referent Influencer—is in the person’s social network and generally has a fairly large following, but not always. Referent influencers are generally highly active in social media and usually have a larger following than the casual user. It is the level of meaningful activity that makes referent influencers essential to your network. Referent influencers are usually easier to get closer to than expert influencers and it is often easier to gain their support. By their very nature, referent influencers are genuine and personal and can have tremendous authority. An added bonus—there are far more referent influencers than expert influencers.
Positional Influencer—is often in your inner circle. Fans, friends, and family are all examples of positional influencers. Virtually everyone on social media is a positional influencer to someone else. Effectively targeting positional influencers can help you maintain contact with a large percentage of your potential customers.
Once you have identified influencers that are right for your business, the key to using them is in recruiting and mobilizing. The easiest way to begin to do this is to follow these influencers, engage with them by reposting and commenting on their contents, and post valuable content of your own. In social media, what comes around goes around. In other words, be good to anyone who is being good to you.
Keep Current on Best Practices in Social Media
As a business, you need to keep current with changes in social platforms, tools, and tactics that can affect the ROI you can achieve from your social media strategy. One thing you can always count on in social media is that things change, at times overnight.
How can you stay on top of current trends? We recommend following industry-leading social media blogs such as socialfresh, hubspot, and mashable for the most current thinking on how businesses can take advantage of social media. Identify key bloggers in your industry. (Remember those key influencers that we mentioned above?) They can be a good source of industry-specific social media information.
Putting It All Together
Once you have set up a system for monitoring your social environment, don’t forget to actually use the system on a continual and on-going basis. In addition, the information that is collected must be collected, analyzed and disseminated to interested and relevant audiences within your organization in order to maximize the ROI of your social media efforts.
No comments:
Post a Comment