How to get social media right – part 2

Social media, especially Facebook, is an excellent source of highly-engaged website visitors. I’ve studied one of SA’s top 5 online content contributor’s website, over its lifespan at the time, and visitors via Facebook drove high levels of engagement, followed by visitors via Twitter.

This is exactly what you want; people engaging with your website or blog content, whether it is to sign up for a newsletter, buy a product via a website.

How to get social media marketing right. Image courtesy of Freepix.

Brand vs Performance Social Media

So, a social media post must be visually appealing, but is that all? A social media post must also be clear in its intention.

Engaging with your customers properly will result in generating revenue and building online brand awareness or consideration. Split these concepts into separate campaigns.

There must be a clear split between which social campaigns are ‘brand’ and which campaigns are about revenue or ‘performance’, each with their own objectives. However, they need to be aligned with one another to optimally complete the purchase funnel for a brand to achieve its overall goal of driving revenue.

You don’t want mixed messages; the brand social media will fulfil the awareness and consideration phase of the purchase funnel, while the performance social media will close the deal to sell more products or services. Your performance campaign will be less effective if the brand campaign doesn’t generate sufficient awareness and consideration.

Brand campaigns should be about reach, video views and website visits, with a call-to-action such as “learn more”. Performance campaigns should be about Cost Per Acquisition for app installs, online shopping or leads, with a CTA of “shop now”.

That’s it for part two, look out for part 3 soon.