Build a mutual beneficial social relationship with your audience

Posted by Anton on Aug 30, 2011 in Social Media

It is really common knowledge these days that your business needs a solid social media presence as part of your digital marketing strategy. By simply using a range of Web 2.0 channels and creating profiles on them doesn’t mean success.

It is vital that you know and understand the extent to which your social media marketing campaign is actually influencing people.  If your social media efforts are not showing the results you wished to achieve, then your strategy is simply not working.  How can you monitor and check if you are having an effect online at all?

Check your reach

There’s a couple of Web 2.0 influence analysis tools available such as the popular “Twitter counter” and “Klout” that can give you an overall score, based on your social activity, that will provide you with statistics on the “range” of your online activity.

The nice thing about these Web 2.0 services are that they give you the topics that you are the most influential on.  It also tells you which people you are influencing the most, and day by day visual charts detailing the growth of your online presence over the past few days.  These tools can also give you predictions of how many followers you could potentially reach if your online presence activity remains the same.

The statistics provided by these tools can give you a good idea if you are heading in the right direction, but they shouldn’t be used to check if your campaign is a success or not.  It only provides you with information on how to increase your score.

Are you getting through to your network?

When you are checking your results on these Web 2.0 tools, you might be a little bit shocked to see how you are really getting through to people.  A brand could have 10 000 followers on Twitter, which really seems very good, but if they are only engaging with 100 of them on a regular basis then they are barely reaching 1% of their potential prospects through that channel.

As far as digital marketing is concerned, building mutually beneficial social media relationships and getting through to your targeted audience is important in creating a loyal following to your network. The growing number of tools that provides you with your online activity reach have made it easy for brands and individuals to see where they can improve their digital marketing efforts with very little professional help.