Welcome to the first entry in our new bi-weekly social media series: Social Strategy. Over the course of this series, we'll look at some common mistakes people make with their social media strategy and offer ideas and solutions that you can use to expand your presence and engage with your audience on several popular networks.
Social media has become a powerful area in terms of audience communication and interaction. It's easier than ever using these channels to reach people who are interested in what you have to offer. Remember the old maxim – build it, and they will come. While not as prominent as Facebook, Twitter has become a very popular platform, boasting 320 million monthly active users. Not every one of those users will be interested in your organization – in fact, the overwhelming majority probably don't speak your language. However, it, like other social media channels, can be used as microcosms of inbound marketing. You don't need to establish contact to be successful – they will come to you.
Impressions
Impressions are often the prevalent metric on Twitter – that is, how many people have seen any given tweet. In terms of your marketing strategy, getting a lot of impressions may seem like a positive thing.
The more people that see your tweets, the better, right?
This is a common mistake to make. Although impressions are certainly useful for providing when the most people are seeing your tweets, it's limited to exactly that – passively viewing your tweets.
Think of the last time you read a book you didn't particularly like. You may have read it, but you probably didn't engage with it. That's the same thing that happens with impressions on Twitter. In fact, it's a guarantee that not even users that follow you will see all of your tweets, whether because they're not online at the right time or they follow too many people to reliably keep up with everything that's posted.
Engagement
The metric that you actually want to judge the success of your tweets on is engagement. Engagement displays how many people retweeted, replied to, liked a tweet, or interacted with it in some other way – clicks to your profile link, detail expands (clicking on a tweet opens it in a pop-up window), link clicks, or hashtag clicks.
Engagement provides valuable insights into how many people actually interacted with your tweet in some way. This is where you can get information about your audience. If your engagement percentage is low, don't feel bad about it – not every tweet can be a winner, and the percentage is based off of the number of engagements divided by the total number of impressions you've had.
Depending on how many people see your tweets, your engagement percentage may be very low, but it's very useful to see the amounts and types of engagements on a given tweet. Having this information readily available, and accessible from anywhere, allows you to tweak your Twitter strategy on the fly based on real-time metrics, so you can focus on what works best for you to drive engagement with your account.
SimplyCast 360 can be a valuable tool when planning social media campaigns. You can schedule messages to post automatically, ensuring that you receive the maximum number of both impressions and engagements. Please sign up for a 14-day free trial so you can experience the amazing effect that timed and targeted communication can have on your Twitter presence.
