Get to spying on your competitors
Social media marketing has become one of the most important skills a business needs to master in order to maximize their earnings. With so many social media platforms, it is hard to decide which one to spend the bulk of your advertising budget on.
Facebook and Twitter certainly seem to be the favorites du jour, and there is plenty of research to back this up. Also, consider this: by the end of 2014, around 17 percent of all posts on Facebook were paid and the importance of social spending is expected to continue growing.
Running an effective campaign
As with everything else in life, it is tempting to jump in with both feet and the best of intentions, as you want to launch your business into the social media sphere as soon as possible; but if you pay to promote your content and it doesn’t help you achieve your larger goals, you’re throwing your money away.
Your social media posts should be carefully crafted and not promoted until you have done the appropriate research to determine which avenue will help you reach your goal most effectively. Thankfully, there are several tools on the market that can assist you in running a more effective social media marketing campaign.
Taking the guesswork out of promoted posts
One new tool, Promoted Post Detection (PPD), offered by Socialbakers, aims to take the guesswork out of promoted posts on Facebook. It offers cutting-edge analytics, as well as, tell you how much and where you competition is spending their advertising money.
By knowing how often your competitors are promoting, you can determine if your own budget is the right size. Are you spending too much or too little? If their approach is working better than yours, you may need to readjust.
It will also tell you if you are boosting the right posts
If you have been boosting more posts than your competition, but their posts are still seeing more views and interactions, you may need to reassess your strategy and experiment with different post types.
The analytical tool will also give you an idea of what your competition plans to do in the future: if you see a spike in sales spending it may mean a new product or marketing campaign is on the way.
One of your long-term goals may be creating a deeper relationship with your fanbase. With PPD you can see what your competition is posting and if this boosting their fanbase. This again, will assist you in building your own marketing attack plan.
Balancing organic and paid reach
Even with these tools, it is possible to fall into the trap of targeting the wrong audience, or using the wrong campaign-type. This is to be expected. Your social media marketing strategy should depend on your brand, the industry in which you operate, and your long term goals.
Finding a good balance between organic and paid reach is the goal of every business on Facebook. Seeing what your competition is up to with PPD can give you a good baseline on which to build your own strategy.
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Jennifer Walpole is a Senior Staff Writer at The American Genius and holds a Master's degree in English from the University of Oklahoma. She is a science fiction fanatic and enjoys writing way more than she should. She dreams of being a screenwriter and seeing her work on the big screen in Hollywood one day.