When we talk about social media strategy, the first names that come up are Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest & the other shiny ones. The number of organizations who do not have their pages in these accounts will be near zero in today’s world. But what about Data-Driven Social Media Strategy? Brands have been taking advantage of the social media channels for promoting their services & products by sending out creative posts, funny images & marketing tweets and spending more and more budget for paid ads. But what about evaluating the social ROI & tracking performance? This is where the importance of Data-Driven Social Media Strategies comes up. Okay…First things first. Data-Driven Social Media isn’t just a buzzword. It is the ultimate answer to all the questions that every social media marketer of this decade has struggled with.

Why Data-Driven Social Media Strategy

Twitter Icon Instagram Icons Social Media Facebook If we track the performance of corporates in social media marketing, it can be seen as the platform where marketers have been showing off their creative & artistic skills in a corporate manner but the approach has always been a “spray and pray” one. This is one of the primary reasons that they can’t see the ROI of social & why a Data-Driven Social Media Strategy is needed. If you are not spending time in tracking your social media marketing performance, you will be spending more time in guesstimating & end up not knowing what’s effective & will finally lead to waste of money, resources & opportunities to connect with the audience you really want. The sad part is that you’ll end up hurting your brand image since you are not providing what your audience wants & not knowing where you are going wrong. This is exactly why it’s important for marketers to adapt & evolve a Data-Driven Social Media mindset towards marketing in social media channels. Data has the power to tell what your targeted audience wants, what strategy will work, where to make investment & where to stop wasting time.

Key advantages of Data-Driven Social Media marketing

As mentioned above, Data-Driven Social Media marketing has its own perks:
  • Finding the right audience
  • Identifying the ideal social media platforms that work
  • Upgrading the effectiveness & reach of campaigns
  • Better comparison against competitors
All of which will aid you in exceeding your performance & attaining social ROI and the best part is that getting started with Data-Driven Social Media marketing doesn’t have to be complex or tricky. Useful data can be gathered effortlessly with the right strategies & can be presented in the simplest way possible for making better decisions.

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Crafting & Executing Data-Driven Social Media Marketing Strategies

Since it’s established that Data-Driven Social Media marketing is the way to do business, let’s get on to knowing where to begin

1. Set your goals to match your metrics

Social media marketing is as same other business functions which are based on goals which must be specific, clear-cut & straight to the point. Your goals can be on increasing brand reach, improving brand image, increasing web traffic or on increasing conversions but what should be kept in mind is that a measurable goal is the one that has key performance indicators that can be analyzed for Data-Driven Social Media Marketing. A realistic goal will have elements from which it can be identified whether it’s possible to achieve in the set time with the available resources or not. Marketers can make use of growth-based & vision-based techniques that are customizable for generating desired results and methods like the intriguing metrics that involve measuring the low & high traffic to find opportunities for growth.

2. Choosing the right tools

Personally, I am not your typical data geek. I hate mining for a single piece of information in the data sea. But due to the grace of marketing gods & technology, there are data tools designed for all these. For starters there are: *Google Analytics                  *Mention *The Brand Grader                *Kissmetrics Each designed for specific purposes including tracking the engagement by source, analyzing the performance of competitors, identifying top mention sources, the social following of the brand, where your visitors come from, whether they converted or simply left. All, which enables you in tracking down where to put the dollar for maximum efficiency. In other words, Data-Driven Social Media Marketing is practically impossible without the benefits of these cool tools.

3. Get your content right

There are several Ad types in the market that are specific to each category of audience. But what makes an Ad campaign successful is when it communicates accurate information to the right audience. If you are executing advertising consideration stage campaigns, it’ll be most effective when the content not only tempts the user to click on it & provides more information but also entice them to do an action which can either be sending people to your website, getting installs of your app or fill forms. For this to happen the content must be sensational enough for the user. Best thing to do is you are new to crafting content for Data-Driven Social Media is to analyze how your best competitors campaigns & review their engagement. This will give you ideas on what content will perform best for your audience. You can also take advantage of the options on Offer Claim ads, Clicks to website & event ads depending on the content & your target audience.

4. Keep an eye on the time

You might have kept statistical reports on which time will be best for posting, tweeting & sending out messages as per facts available in internet. But there is a better way of doing this. You can make use of your own data from your past social media posts & analyze the performance on the time & day you posted them. This will also enable you to audit the content that you are posting across the social media channels & perform your best. Also, once you have exact data on these you can keep a track of it using a variety of tools for scheduling according to your requirement for better management.

Now put your Data-Driven Social Media Strategy to work

One of the reasons that marketers complain about being data-driven is that it doesn’t come naturally to creative people. But it doesn’t have to be that way as it’s not that complicated. Know what’s important for your work, identify the metrics for measuring, make better decisions & most importantly be consistent in your Data-Driven Social Media approach. Happy Data-Driven Social Media Marketing… Also read on: MAKE YOUR B2B PROSPECTS LOVE YOUR BLOGS WITH CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGIES