ASSESSING THE BUSINESS VALUE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS

Many companies who take social media seriously have established accounts on a wide spectrum of social networks. As different gargantuan proportions of consumers use one or more types of online medium, marketers know that pouring all their efforts in to one is the definition of having all your eggs in one basket, clichéd as it may be.

However, with so many different social networks, how do we know which ones will be worth our time?

Here are a few key aspects that marketers can use to assess the business value of any social network:

Membership

Looking at the followers of major social networks such as Facebook and Twitter reveals that billions have signed up to the services. Creating business accounts on the main contenders is the first way to go about boosting your social engagement. Deciphering which networks your clients and target audience use is the next step – so that you can grow your online reach and make sure that you are not merely preaching to the converted.

Lead Generation

Many marketers judge the value of their social network participation by the percentage of leads they can generate through their efforts. Gaining information from your social network audience is a great way to fine-tune your business and the best way to keep them engaged is by providing genuinely useful information.

Online marketing requires a different approach to traditional direct mailing: you need to engage with the customer on a level, providing engagement that is useful to both parties. Establishing useful conversations with customers on social media channels and sharing interesting content are key lead generators for any business.

Assessing which networks are best suited to bring your company new leads and customers is one of the best clues as to which one/s will be best worth your time.

Customer Feedback

Aside from educating your consumers, another crucial component of social networks is the ability to receive business feedback from your customers. When a high engagement rate is achieved, then companies can begin to evaluate their business performance by analysing the comments, responses and forms of engagement from customers.

Here at Thread, we constantly analyse the changing face of social networks, having watched them grow from a means of interaction between friends and family into indispensible marketing tools.

So if you need to learn how to create mass lead generation with Pinterest, boost your business connections with LinkedIn or raise brand awareness through Twitter, we can teach you how to use the main contenders to the best of their ability.

Or, if you are still deciding which social networks are worth your time then we are more than happy to help. Contact us today on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or good old-fashioned email, to find out how we could help you take your social media strategy into the online stratosphere.