You took the advice of everyone and finally got yourself a few social media accounts and have been plugging away at engaging content. You’ve been following the accounts you should, commenting on the right posts and even writing blogs of your own to share with your audience. BUT – it’s not working! It’s been a couple of months and having looked at what others are doing you can’t see where you’re going wrong, so what can it be?
How long is realistic to wait until I start seeing real leads from social media?
We don’t know who ever said social media is a golden ticket to over-night success, because it’s not. It’s not even a two, or three-month ticket to success. It takes time, which can’t be a standard for all business types and industries, you must figure that out as you go. And here’s how:
How to spend your time on social media
1. Profiles and bios. Get them full of benefits and imagery that reflects the services to your largest client base. Be truthful and positive, include calls to action and hashtags.
2. Planning. Narrow down your audience, know who they are, what they do, where they go, when they’re on social media and what they want to hear about. Plan your content to speak directly to your audience and mix it up with questions, statements and images. Keep advertising to a 20% maximum. Use a document or content calendar to time your posts.
3. Retrospect. At the end of each month, check your insights and analytics to find out what worked and more importantly, what didn’t. Change your plan accordingly, play with polls, photo albums or even adding in different platforms like Periscope, Pinterest or Instagram. Measure and compare each month’s reports to get a clear idea of the best plan for the coming campaigns.
4. Be consistent. Find the time each week, fortnight or even month to spend time on filling your social media schedule. We would recommend you find a scheduling dashboard tool such as Hootsuite to help you plan your time, but strongly recommend you take part in daily, live interaction too.
5. Paid for advertising. There is nothing wrong with a bit of social media advertising. Used correctly it is a highly effective tool for increasing your visibility in the market and conversion of leads. Any marketing company would suggest you pay careful attention to your Google Analytics at this point so you can measure the ROI. Social media advertising is inexpensive by comparison and always worth investigating.
By the time you have four months behind you, you should have an accurate representation of how social media works for your business. Then you wait, you keep plugging away, keep interacting and you will see results. However long you think it might take, it will take a lot longer if you don’t start today!
For further reading, get a load of these stats.
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