Whether you’re organizing your next campaign or creating a brand from the ground up, one important element to consider is social media. Let us fill you in on the importance of a social media presence for your brand:

• Online adults aged 18-34 are most likely follow a brand via social networking
•  71% of consumers who have had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others
•  There are now more than 50 million small businesses using Facebook Pages to connect with their customers. 4 million of those businesses pay for social media advertising on Facebook

You’ll want to consider a number of questions:

• What platform(s) should my brand be on?
•  Who am I trying to reach and which platform(s) are they on?
• Who will manage my social media pages?
• What is my goal with my social media? Direct users to our website? Brand awareness?

Looking at the analytics of one of our clients’ websites reveals the following information about where their traffic is coming from:

46% are coming from social platforms. This means that when we post on Facebook or Twitter and include the URL to the client’s website, users are clicking on these URLs to visit the site.

39% of users are directly typing in the client’s URL, 13.6 % are coming from referral (meaning clicking on the URL from other sources such as news articles), and 1.4% are coming from Google or other search engines.

In addition to utilizing Google Analytics to ensure our social media content is directing users to the client’s website, we consistently check a number of other analytics. Here is what we analyze on Facebook and Twitter to help show our clients that the social plan we’ve crafted is valuable for what they’re trying to achieve:

• Page views/likes/followers, monthly and weekly, tracking when we get likes based on when we post and what types of content we post
• Popularity of posts by reach and engagement
• Engagements – keeping in touch with who is responding to our posts or reaching out to us on social media
• Sharing of our content – understanding what is relevant and important to our clients’ followers

With every client, we research their different demographics and analytics to best identify which platforms they should be on. This varies for each client. Some clients are just on Facebook, where their demographic can most easily be reached, whereas for others, Twitter or Instagram is where their audience is most active.

Additionally, consider what kind of content your audience would most want to hear or see. What is “share-worthy” to your audience? You want to have a combination of creating your own fresh content, sharing others’ content, and responding to users where applicable. For example, on Twitter, our clients often will be tagged and we make sure to both share this content and respond to it.

When crafting your next campaign, an important piece of the pie to consider is social media. Which platforms should your company be on? What kind of content would be interesting and relevant to your followers? Start with these questions when developing your social media plan and we’re sure you’ll start to reach your audience in no time.