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Social Media and Google: A Powerful Social Media Combo

 In Social Media, Social Media Optimizaiton

All hail the mighty Google for making social media marketing stand strong. This perfect marriage of business tools can make the difference between sending social media posts out into the dark space of the Internet vs targeting your message to the right people. Let’s go back to the basics and examine the backbone of this powerful social media combo.

Define your audience

It’s easy to set up a social media account and post messages talking at people, but it’s more effective if talk to the people. Know who you are talking to and then listen to them. An effective approach is to analyze your data to see who is visiting your site, define who your customer base is and create a goal to target and market to a new customer niche.

Thanks to the good folks at Google, with just a few clicks of a button you can look at the demographics of your website audience.  For example, in the image below, you can see that the demographics for this website are mostly male visitors between the ages of 25-34. However, if you look again you can see that there is a decent demographic of women between the ages of 35-54. If you formulate a marketing plan to target and attract that audience, you can increase your customer base.

Define your audience

Analyze the Competition

Every business needs a benchmark, and it’s called competition. The social media playground is busy, and as a business you have to work hard to keep your users engaged. Every business is just one viral post away from their competitor’s marketing savvy. So how do you stay on your toes? Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

In Twitter, you can easily set up a private competitor list and check it daily to see what the competition is posting. What is it that they do best? What do you do better? Take a closer look and watch how they interact with their customers. The art of social media is not doing social, but being social.

Calling on Google again, set up a Google alert with your competitors and industry as keyword searches. You can have the alerts be sent directly to email or you can check the RSS feed at your leisure. Either way, this is a simple, yet effective approach to stay on top of things.

Analyze the competition

Set up a Google alert to keep up with industry news and competition.

Set a goal

There are many companies with a social media presence. Some of them have Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts just because they think they should, while others have a strategic plan for each account they manage. Be the latter, and carefully seek out those social sites that will benefit your company.

Using Google Analytics, a great way to track and measure your company’s social media success is to set up a goal in GA to track conversions. The key to ensure this success is to add conversion tracking to your links. (See next section). You can set up any page on your site to become a goal. Contact us forms and newsletter sign- ups are great examples of goals.

Set a goal in Google

Schedule Track and Measure Everything

The line that gets drawn in the sand for social media marketers is: You can post content all day and night, but if you don’t track and measure your results how can you calculate the ROI in your social media budget?

Enter Google UTM tracking: By adding a prefix of codes to the end of your URL, you will have the ability to track the performance of that particular link. Using the Google Campaign URL Builder makes it a breeze. The form is easy enough for anyone to use. Once you make a list of the shortened links, I highly recommend keeping a spreadsheet of them so you can refer back to them easily. Tip: by simply adding a plus sign to the end of a shortened Google link, you can view a basic report on how well that link has performed.

Schedule Track and Measure Everything

The above chart illustrates the proper way to tag your links

The key to social media marketing is working smarter, not harder. Prepare an editorial posting calendar. Work with your team to set up goals for the month, track your links and above all, let your creative and fun side shine through.

Our social media team is available to analyze your site at no obligation. Contact us to learn more.

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