YOUR Social Media Business Insights?

Three ways to understand and apply social media insights to your business..

The internet has impacted the way most, if not all, industries have evolved. Keeping up with industry trends and available platforms is a job in and of itself. In particular, social media is shaping the way many companies engage with customers and drive sales.

In the education industry, the internet has revolutionized the way people learn and how they interact with their peers.

Based on my experience working with social media influencers to engage students, I’d like to share three tips for entrepreneurs in any industry.

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Learn How Your Target Audience Is Using Social Media

You can never stay hot for too long in the world of social media. One minute Snapchat is the app of the hour, the next it’s Instagram, and the cycle continues. Social media has secured credibility in recent years as a trusted source of information not only for news but also as a platform for consumers to engage with companies and exchange information.

My company’s target audience is students, and we have found that students today use social media in ways that are foreign to generations that did not grow up in the digital age. For example, “study with me” videos have become a popular internet sensation among youth. My company decided to capitalize on this opportunity by partnering with YouTube influencers to learn how students are using YouTube to study; we then applied that information to our platform to better help our users succeed academically.

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Understanding how your target audience is using and benefiting from social media is critical to success.

This applies to any business. Many companies are under the impression that all there is to social media is a simple press of a button to post content, but that’s not where the value lies. Building your presence is important, but understanding why you have that presence will help you properly utilize your channels and benefit in multiple ways.

To do so, connect with your target audience and customers. Create surveys, send personal emails or even make phone calls to understand how your customers are using social media and in what ways your business can have a valuable impact.

Get a deeper understanding of your audience behavior and which channels you should focus on.

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Identify Why Certain Platforms Are Working

When sifting through the social media landscape, a key priority is understanding and identifying why certain platforms are working. What about certain channels make your target audience inclined to use them?

When speaking to one of our YouTube partners, we discovered this community of “study together” videos had been booming for the last few years. We found that there were numerous reasons students were turning to YouTube when it came time to study. Whether it was to have a “buddy” or merely to learn from someone other than a tutor, our target customers were engaging with this platform in a way we hadn’t seen before.

Connecting with partners has enabled us to dig deeper into the world of online learning and helped us further develop features for our own platform. I believe every entrepreneur can learn from this example. Finding that outside party to provide valuable insights is a crucial element to success.

If you're looking to establish a partnership with an influencer, you can be certain they are getting cold emails on a regular basis. To differentiate yourself, provide your potential partner with something that can help advance their career; this is a two-way street. Directly address why you are reaching out to them and how your partnership will be beneficial. Let them know why your goals align and how you can work together to create a successful partnership.

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Understand The Trends

Once you have done your homework and established concrete partnerships, it’s vital to understand where the trends are headed. In our case, we saw that not only were students using social media to communicate with one another, but academic institutions were relying heavily on social media to communicate as well.

It’s important to research what others in your industry are doing to reach the same audiences. Various sectors within our industry are using platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Google Plus to connect with students. Students want to collaborate and have someone available for support. We saw a heavy focus on group communication, which led us to configure a group study function on our own platform.

Guest Authored By Daniel Zhao. Daniel is founder of StudyGate Inc. The online tutoring community dedicated to connecting students and world-class tudors from around the globe. Follow Daniel on Twitter.

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"All entrepreneurs can learn from this example by taking the time to see what trends their audiences are following and why these trends tend to be working. Make time on a weekly basis to read your industry and social media marketing publications to understand how the landscape is growing and shifting. Overall, continue to evaluate your social media strategies through the lens of industry trends and your target audience to help you determine the next course of action.." -DanielZhao

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  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, CO. where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

YOUR Social Media Engagement Metric?

PR and digital marketers frequently consider engagement a key social media metric. Yet some believe online engagement is faltering. Fewer brands engage with followers, they assert..

Very few companies, typically larger brands, dedicate the staff for extensive engagement..

Wendy’s tweets are an exception. Even JP Morgan, a huge financial services company, gains few responses on Twitter, as a glance at its feed shows, as Arik C. Hanson, principal of ACH Communications, points out in his marketing and communications blog. It treats Twitter as a broadcast channel. Accenture, a large B2B brand with over 300,000 followers, elicits little response on Twitter.

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Trolls, the 2016 Election, and general declining interest in online conversations may be to blame for the decline in engagement. Online publications are closing comments sections on articles. In a most recent example, Vice shut down its comments section, blaming an overabundance of trolls. Publications say they’re moving conversations to social media, but those conversations are now also increasingly dominated by hyper-political debates, personal attacks and hate speech.

Winning Engagement is Challenging for Brands

Sparking engagement is more difficult for brands. Comments and shares have dropped. At their best, comments provide meaningful input, spur conversation, and provide feedback. Shares, the best form of engagement, help spread the brand’s marketing and PR message. Likes, the lowest form of engagement, barely qualify as significant engagement. If comments and shares disappear, brands will be left with very little else, Hanson warns.

Hanson relies on personal observations and lacks hard data. Others have complained of an increase in derogatory comments, especially during the presidential campaign. People may be sharing posts, but share only with people they agree with in their own networks.

Marketers have differing views about the importance of engagement as a social media metric. Some argue engagement indicates the quality of content and the effectiveness of the brand’s marketing more realistically than number of followers.

Even Likes Count

Even the number of likes matter because consumers believe the popularity of a product correlates to its quality, says Lesya Liu, social media strategist at The Social Media Current. “We as entrepreneurs also look at the like counts as a metric for reputation of the company and as a metric for effectiveness of social media marketing efforts,” Liu writes in Entrepreneur.

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However, engagement is not the ultimate business goal, only a tactic to produce leads, clients and sales. Like any other business activity, engagement entails costs and resources that must be balanced against results. The key to success is determining how engagement helps you reach your business goals.

Engagement must be linked to business objectives. Engagement is only a tool, one that’s not extremely valuable on its own unless it’s tied to a measurable goal. Those goals can be customer acquisition, product development, customer service or brand awareness.

Guest Authored By William Comcowich. William founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media. Follow William on Twitter.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Follower Engagement?

"Bottom Line: Engagement may be falling out of favor as a social media metric.

Trolls and declining interest in online conversations may be putting a damper on engagement.

Some brands may place a low priority on engagement, and instead use social networks as a broadcast channel.

Many marketers tout the benefits of engagement, saying it can accurately measure marketing success. The key is to link engagement with bottom-of-the funnel metrics.."

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

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