When the needle moves, feed the beast

Whether you understand the value of social media to your business or not there are some indisputable facts:
1. Most of your target audience uses it everyday
2. Creative account owners generate the most engagement
3. The more engagement, (followers, likes, friends, comments and shares), the more conversions

For busy sectors, (fields or industries where there is much noise; i.e., social media chatter), it’s tougher to get traction. Most active social media campaigns with limited budgets take more than 18 months to begin to gain traction. Even with substantial budgets traction can be difficult if there is a lot of noise. For instance, if you wanted to engage in the social media dialogue regarding the current Presidential race you’d be competing with the candidates, the news media, and the social media networks themselves. Yet advertising spend beyond the investment in content generation is still critical to getting your conversation started. And while budgeting for this approach is important, measuring response is vital. Tracking the performance of the campaign through all the native metrics from Facebook, Google, Twitter etc. allows us to monitor interaction with the content. Essentially, install of analytical reports and the goals associated with them is what we refer to as “installing the needle.” Once we see a spike in the data we have to determine whether it’s an anomaly or if it’s relative to a specific post. To test that theory, we add more posts with similar content. If the needle continues to move upward then we’ve found a “touch point”. Now we need to increase content, promote engagement, (for e-commerce clients that means customer rewards or incentive programs), and increase exposure with geo-targeted ads to the areas where the engagement is occurring. That “feeding” then has to be allocated as part of the overall budget because without fail, the moment you stop is the moment the interaction stalls. The attached images show clearly what happens when you stop engaging and promoting your cause through social media. Social media visits drop off, then website visits trail off, and finally there’s less engagement with your email campaigns. In other words, when the needle moves, “feed the beast.”