Are the companies investing in social sign-on for digital services seeing an increase in users and a return on investment?  With over 1.6 billion users on Facebook alone and over a billion connected Google Accounts more and more people conduct their daily business online. There has never been a more opportune time for organisations to track their marketing statistics and monitor user activity.  Unlike traditional advertising mediums, social media statistics give you a lot more marketing data to work with to identify leads. Through social interaction and engagement organisations can learn a lot about their existing users and potential customers.  Let's discuss how an active social presence can help your business.

 

The first thing to do is to define your social strategy and marketing goals for your business, examples being brand awareness, website traffic, repeat visitors, sales inquiries and leads, and conversions.

 

Secondly using the right social platforms for your business create a social presence so content can be showcased within these channels.

 

The next important aspect of social is either through regular content or directly using onsite tools, drive traffic to your website. Include offers, discounts, blogs, white papers, videos, case studies, photos, and social media icons on your website to allow users to share, like or comment about your content onto their social channels.

 

iStock_000074083741_Small

 

The following points cover how a business can maximise the use of social networks in conjunction with their website:

 

  1. Make the sign in process to your site simple for users by reducing the barrier to entry and using social login to allow access to content.  Show your users you trust them and don't deter them with registration forms.
  2. Collect permission based-identity data from user social profiles when they login through facebook.
  3. Promote campaigns, refresh content on your website to increase brand awareness  across social networks. Encourage users to use functionality such as like, share or follow which pushes your brand and content back out to the users social networks.
  4. Track customer data via user profiles for specific targeting and real time segmentation to increase conversions and stickiness.
  5. Use social profile data to identify how customers or prospects are engaging on social networks, what do they regularly like, what articles do they share, their location etc.
  6. Measuring your social media success by comparing customer engagement to multiple trends can provide key information about your users and how leads can be generated.

 

For certain sectors such as news and media the benefits of social media are much greater. Not only do they benefit from advertising revenue but users regularly share content with their connections who also have connections and so on. This is a lucrative distribution channel for news providers.

 

Social media provides a great source of information, intimacy and engagement that, if used correctly with web properties, can drive considerable brand value, viral reach and importantly drive revenue streams.  This is merely a snapshot, there are many more elements to social engagement.

For more on this get in touch.