Social media is a place of infinite opportunities for your business. No matter, how big or small your company is, there’s always a place and audience for you and your product on social media.
Social media platforms continue to grow, presenting the business world with great marketing opportunities. The trend of marketing on social media is expected to stay, which is supported by various stats:
- As of April 2019, the number of social media users has exceeded 3.5 billion, with Facebook being the most popular social platform.
Image credit: Statista
- Social media allows marketers to reach a variety of audiences. For instance, the stats show that among all active social media users, 90.4% of millennials, 77.5% of Gen X and 48.2% of baby boomers use social media platforms daily.
- As of now, 88% of companies use social media for marketing purposes.
The importance of social media is also supported by the fact that more and more social media users find and contact brand through social platforms. Reportedly, 63% of social media users expect companies to offer customer support service through social media.
Thus, social media have become a comprehensive, all-in-one marketing tool. But there’s more to social media besides the obvious benefits like boosting sales and benefiting brand exposure.
In return, social media provides marketers with big volumes of social data, necessary for creating successful marketing campaigns.
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A Better Look at Social Data
To put it simply, social data is a collection of information that is collected from across several social media platforms. It includes but not limited to:
- likes
- shares
- comments
- location
- language
- means of communication
- link clicks
- personal data
- other feedback
All these aspects together provide marketers with relevant, up-to-date information, which is important to launch a marketing campaign.
As you have probably already gathered, all the above-mentioned sources of social data provide you with an enormous amount of information. Although it is hard to keep up with such big volumes of data, it still brings you a ton of benefits:
- Regularly updated data. It may be viewed either as a benefit or a curse. It is definitely an advantage to always remain updated about how your social media profiles are performing, but it is hard to extract one final solution for your marketing campaign. Nevertheless, having this data at hand can give you the understanding of important aspects of a marketing campaign, like determining target audience personas.
- Increasing brand exposure. Analyzing social data gives you an understanding, what content your followers want to see. From this point forward, you can identify which content will shape your marketing campaign. Thus, you can create a video marketing strategy or build your marketing campaign on interactive content.
- More options for personalization. As you regularly receive feedback from your target audience, it becomes easier to figure out how to create content that is more personalized and engaging.
Now, let’s talk about how you can bring these potential benefits to life.
1. Studying Target Audience
A vital part of any marketing campaign is determining target audience personas. Without a target audience, your marketing campaign just loses focus.
To determine audience personas, first, take a look at your existing social media following. Take several people and describe them using the following categories:
| Demographic Criteria | Psychographic Criteria |
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Compare the results of the following analysis to the target audience persona description that you have for your marketing campaign. This will help you determine which platform will be the best for the next marketing campaign.
Also, taking a look at the general use of social media, broken down by gender, age, or location, can help you see, which audience dominates on each social media platform. For instance, the stats on gender use of social media show the following information (as provided by Statista):
These numbers and social data collected from your own social media profiles can help you understand, who you want to target in your social media campaign and which platform is the best one to do it.
2. Keeping Up with Trends Through Hashtag Campaigns
A hashtag is your pathway to discover and attract new followers. But a hashtag is also an important contributor to the success of your marketing campaign. Analyzing the performance of hashtags will help you determine the ones that will ultimately shape your marketing campaign.
Besides using more popular hashtags that are relevant to your industry, you can increase brand exposure if you create a branded hashtag and place it together with the hashtag with higher performance. This is a common practice, used by many companies in their marketing campaigns.
For instance, an international real estate company Flatfy launched their first Instagram campaign using #bootstrap along with their branded hashtag #flatfy. After some time, social data, mined from these hashtags, showed that #bootstrap has given #flatfy a significant boost:
Image credit: Hashtagify.me
Image credit: Hashtagify.me
Take a look at your previous social media marketing campaigns. Which hashtags performed the best and can be used in your next marketing campaign? This social data will help your marketing campaign remain in trend.
3. Keeping Track of KPI Using UTM Links
Social data also plays an important role in tracking the KPIs of a marketing campaign. However, keeping track of all social data, when the marketing campaign has already been launched, is very difficult as it comes from many different sources.
The easiest way to create one funnel for all this information is to use UTM links.
UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) code consists of the bits of text that are manually added to the link to provide Google Analytics with more information about each link.
Here’s how it works. For example, you need to promote your new blog on your website, and you post links to your new blog posts on social media. Replacing a regular link with a UTM link can help you track, which social media platform your visitors come from.
To create a UTM Link, you need to include the following information:
- website URL;
- campaign source – e.g. google, newsletter, or any other referrer;
- campaign medium – e.g. email, social media, etc.;
- campaign name;
- campaign term – keywords related to your marketing campaign;
- campaign content – if you use different ads for one campaign.
UTM links answer three questions regarding marketing campaign KPIs:
1) Where does the traffic come from?
2) Why is it coming?
3) How (through which means) is it coming?
Social data, collected from UTM links can not only be beneficial for tracking KPIs of your current marketing campaigns but also can provide valuable insights for your next campaigns.
Explore Social Data!
Social data provides marketers with answers to the most difficult and confusing questions. Besides helping you analyze your audience, keep up with the trends and track the success of your marketing campaign, it also gives on the answers, how you can boost sales and fix product-related issues.
Although it is difficult to mine and to apply, social data still bring a lot of benefits to marketers. Hopefully, tips that we discussed in this article, will help you better understand how social data can be applied to launch a successful marketing campaign.