When investing time and financial resources into the development of your social media presence there’s an “elephant in the room” situation that needs to be addressed. 

How can you connect your business goals, with your social media strategy?  

In many cases, in fact, the language of business strategy is not easily translated into your social media plan. It’s like these two dimensions of business had little if any overlap. 

Some people go as far as calling social media a vanity metric, considering how “likes” and “shares” have in many cases nothing to do with actual profits and bottom lines. After having spent money and effort on a vibrant social profile, nothing has changed in terms of profits or revenue.

Having said that, if we do look into the matter with a little more focus, we can see that there are many goals and business objectives that can be connected to your social media strategy. 

All we need to do is to learn how to translate business metrics into social media metrics and vice versa.

In this post, we’re going exactly that as we’re looking at 4 examples of how business strategy can be very well aligned with the focus of your social media presence. 

With no further ado, let’s dive into the subject.

#1 Build Branding and Awareness

One of the first goals that can be pursued by developing a strong media presence is connected to increasing the awareness of your brand. In this top-of-the-funnel communication, approach brands develop entertaining, educational, or informational content with the intent of attracting users to their social media platforms. 

Even if a brand, is by definition a fairly intangible value, it may seem hard to create a connection between your brand strategy and your social presence. There are in fact two ways in which this can be done.

• Increase Social Presence. By increasing your social presence, and developing more than one social profile your brand increases the chances of interacting with potential customers.
  
  We need to remind ourselves that customers go to social media to test a brand promise, therefore, by being present on social media, a business can make sure that validation can be provided to their prospective customers.

• Increase Organic Positioning (SEO). By developing a social media presence, and by sharing and liking content, the organic reach and impact of your branded content get an additional element of validation that tells search engines that your content works. As a result, your organic search engine results will benefit from a strong social signal. This means that more people will find your articles on the search engine results page and connect with your business.

Great, let’s now move on to a different example connected to strengthening client relationships.

#2 Strengthen Client Relationship

What if instead of building awareness for your brand, you’d like to strengthen your customer relationships? In this case, we can look at the following metrics to help you identify a link between social media following and business performance.

• Increase Followers. Increasing the number of followers can be a way to show how strong and tightly knit is the community surrounding your brand. Followers are often mistaken as an index of profitability for your brand. This is not actually the case, as followers do not necessarily connect to your brand with purchase intent. What followers indicate is that your brand is current and relevant for a broad audience of individuals.
  
• Build a Community. Building a community can be a way to establish a particular “tribe dynamic” within your social media platforms. Some communities can be passion-focused, whereby people join a community with the intent of talking about something they are interested in. The other type of community – which presents a higher conversion rate – is a trigger-event community, where users join a group to ask advice in relation to a new challenge they are approaching and they find themselves unequipped to address. Examples of trigger event communities are connected to parenting, moving to a new city, retiring, etc.
  
• Create Engaging Conversations. Creating engaging conversations relates to measuring the response of your audience to your posts. This can also be an indication of a community of people who feel strongly about a particular issue or cause and are outspoken on the matter. Your brand allows them to have an additional platform to express their views and opinions.

So far, however, both strategies have not shown signs connected to an impact on your business’ profitability. 

What if you wanted to use social media to increase your revenue and profits? What is it that you should be doing then? Let’s see what can be done in the next section of the post.

#3 Attract and Convert New Clients

What if you wanted to use your social media presence to increase the financial success of your company? Well, in that case, these are some of the metrics to look out for.

• Generate Traffic. By creating a compelling and attractive media presence you are able to nurture your clients into a marketing funnel that increases the volume of traffic on your website or visits to your physical store.
  
• Generate Leads. In case your business is not selling a product, but maybe is selling a service, you can still use the interactions fostered by social media to generate leads to your business.
  
• Increase App Downloads. By providing different types of digital products you can build upon a client relationship by offering low-risk\high-reward products that can contribute to selling more profitable products down the line.
  
• Collect Customer Data. By navigating the analytics of your social media profile, you can use data to understand how to better tailor your brand communications to your clients.
  
• Increase Sales. As a result of supporting these bottom-of-the-funnel interactions, your social media presence can actually contribute to your sales by increasing your conversion rate.

Finally, what about post-purchase interactions? Isn’t customer service the new marketing? Well, in the next paragraph we’re going to complete our survey by looking into retention and loyalty.

#4 Increase Customer Retention

Finally, let’s look at how social media can play a role in your customer retention. There are essentially three types of activities that customers conduct on social media that can impact your customer retention rates.

• Increase Mentions. As your products and services become popular, many third-party publishers will review them. When these publishers cover your products and services, they create a content typology that is called “earned media”.  Earned media, is going to be a very influential and persuasive form of content, capable of impacting your users’ retention rate.
  
• Increase Returning Customers. By providing a high-quality service your customers are likely to share their product stories and create user-generated content that is going to extend the reach of your social media influence.
  
• Increase Positive Reviews. Last but not least, as we may already know, by having a strong review profile, filled with happy customers expressing their excitement and delight, our brand will gain a social validation that only social media can provide.

There you have it. In the graphic below you can see a summary of what we have discussed in this post. Now that we’ve touched on all relevant topics, it’s time to draw a few conclusive remarks.

Conclusions

There you have it! In this post, we’ve tried to “translate” social media metrics into measurable results that impact your business. 

One of the biggest challenges when managing social media platforms is that it’s not easy to understand how much your “social success” converts into enhanced business performance.

If you’re looking for a more robust academic backing to your social media management approach, we can recommend a book that can help you develop a successful engagement strategy for your brand: Strategic Social Media Management: Theory and Practice

Moreover, if you’d like to learn more about social media management for your brand, don’t hesitate to check our blog, where we’re sharing a wealth of information on the subject.

If you’re interested in learning more about Content Marketing, don’t hesitate to take a look at our course “Content Marketing for Creative Rockstars“. Our short and to-the-point, online class covers a wide range of topics spanning from developing blog posts capable of driving profitable traffic to strategies for getting strong conversion rates on your landing pages. Here’s a link to the course, if you use the discount code BLOG20 you can access a 20% discount. Enjoy!