Analyze and Fix Your Social Media Marketing in an Hour

There's a lot more to social media than just setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts and making frequent posts. But for many companies, it becomes a nightmare of potential marketing mishaps, meaning that many shy away from the medium or stick to what they know when it comes to their strategy.

However, it's important that you evaluate your activity on social and identify which areas you could improve on to get you closer to your targets. This may be the ideal for many businesses, and even what they intend on doing, but it can seem like a mammoth task that no one has enough time to tackle.

Solving your social media marketing doesn't need to be that complicated or frustrating. These 7 simple tricks will help improve your results and create a strategy that is truly effective for your brand:

Encourage input from others

Social media should never be left up to one person entirely so call on those around you to share insight with you. This can be anything from engaging content they've found online to exciting projects you're doing internally or even success stories from customer services. You should tap into the expertise you have around you as much as possible.

Dedicate time to community management

Many focus on posts; how frequent and long they are, the content you're sharing, the tone of voice etc. Although these are important elements, fostering an online community is just as essential for social media marketing. You need to allocate time in your schedule to reach out to customers and engage with thought leaders.

Use all the tools you can

There are a variety of tools out there that can help you make your social media marketing more effective. From resources like Buffer or HootSuite that make it easier to schedule posts to trend and analytics to resources that make your tweets more engaging, there are plenty of tools out there. Many are free to use or offer free trials so you have nothing to lose by giving them a try.

Focus your efforts

There are too many networks out there for most brands to be effective on all of them. Instead, use your persona research to identify the platforms that your audience is most active on and are open to correspondence on. This will help you focus your time on one or two social networks, rather than trying to do it all at once.

Let data lead the way

Both Facebook and Twitter have integrated analytics software for businesses, making it simple for brands to understand their return on investment (ROI). This is a key part of developing social media strategies over time and ensuring you're building off your successes of the past.

Don't be afraid to learn from the leaders

If you're unsure about what to do on social, start your strategy by looking at what the leaders of your industry are doing. This should inspire and guide you as to what you should be doing on your own social media accounts. You can learn a lot by watching what others are doing, but it's important to offer users something fresh and new with your marketing, rather than duplicating what's already out there.

Plan the way ahead

A content calendar should be the foundation of your social media marketing. This will plan out when your posts will go live, whether by being manually posted or scheduled in, as well as looking at content sources, organic posts, and curated content links. Doing this will allow you to see the bigger picture and general direction of your social marketing. You can also add in other elements like brand values or what persona you are targeting.