In the Age of Information, social media is one of the most effective tools for brands to generate attention.

Research shows that 81% of Millennials check Twitter at least once a day, while 1.28 billion people log onto Facebook daily.

But unfortunately, there are no trophies just for showing up with social media marketing. Even if you’re putting in hours of work every day to promote your brand, there’s no guarantee that you’ll achieve the results you desire.

When you’re working hard but your social media marketing campaigns are still struggling, it’s easy to get frustrated. If you’re in this unenviable position, don’t worry. A couple of strategic alterations can transform your poorly performing campaigns into success stories.

Implement a few of the following tips and watch your social media marketing efforts flourish.

1. Track Your Metrics

As the popular business adage states, “What gets measured, gets managed.” If you’re not tracking your social media metrics, it’s difficult to know what improvements to make.

Some of the most important social media metrics include:

Optimal Times to Post

If you’re posting on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook when your audiences aren’t active, then your content will never receive the engagement that it deserves.

For Twitter, click on the “Tweets” tab and measure your engagement over the last 28 days. For Facebook, consult Page Insights and see the reach of your posts on each day of the week within the “Posts” tab. Here you will find which posts/tweets are getting the most traction and at what time they were posted.

For more information about determining the best time to post on each social media platform, check out this article by HootSuite.

Reach

Reach entails the total amount of people who’re engaging with your content on social media. This is a broad metric for determining the efficacy of your social media marketing.

On Facebook, check out the “Reach” tab within Page Insights. Here, you can see how many people are engaging with your brand over a period of time.

Alternatively, UnionMetrics is an excellent tool for analyzing the reach of all social media platforms.

Audience Growth Rate

In addition to total followers, the rate at which your audience is growing (expressed as a percentage) is worth paying attention to. Evaluate this statistic for each social media platform so you can know where to put your focus.

Social Media Traffic Share

Determining the percentage of website traffic driven by social media is very useful, since you can compare it to your other marketing channels. Check out the “Sessions” tab within Google Analytics to see how much of your traffic is coming from social media.

Conversions

How many people who arrive at your site via social media go on to become paying customers?

If social media represents a significant share of your traffic – but a minimal share of your conversions – then you have a problem with your messaging. If this is the case, analyze your buyer persona and think about how you can tailor your social media content to resonate with this specific individual.

Engaging non-buyers with social media still brings tremendous benefits in terms of brand awareness and SEO, but the end goal should always be driving conversions.

Your ecommerce shopping cart – such as Shopify or BigCommerce – can help you find this data in conjunction with the analytics reporting offered by your web host (Bluehost’s features, for example, include a 1-click analytics install).

2. Think Visually

Visual content is 40X more likely to be shared on social media than other types of content. If you’re not utilizing visual content, you’re being left behind.

For an easy fix, I recommend grabbing relevant visuals from image directories like Morguefile and Pixabay to accompany your social media posts.

Alternatively, you can use Canva to create high quality branded images which are perfect for sharing on social media. Canva is incredibly easy to use, free of charge and you don’t need to be a skilled designer to achieve good results.

If you can include a compelling image with every social media post, you’ll reap the rewards.

3. Utilize Infographics

Infographics have a huge potential for engagement on social media. By publishing well researched infographics that deliver value to your audience, you can differentiate your brand from your competitors.

In addition to their immediate visual appeal, infographics can be repurposed on social media for increased longevity.

While you’ll want to post the complete infographic on Pinterest, try splicing up the infographic into segments, and post key facts, stats and images as numerous standalone posts on Instagram for maximum engagement.

You can also take the most powerful stats from your infographic and repost them as textual snippets, encouraging people to click through to your website to view the complete infographic.

Also, wherever you do post an infographic on your site, ensure all the relevant social media sharing buttons are available and conveniently placed, so people can distribute your content easily.

4. Leverage PPC Advertising

Most marketers these days are using some form of paid advertising to drive cold traffic directly to highly optimized landing pages, attempting to maximize profits.

By using Facebook ads to promote high value pieces of content, such as infographics, you can create an excellent rapport with people before you sell to them.

Once people have viewed your infographic and have warmed to your brand, you can retarget them using Facebook Pixel and send them ads with more direct sales offers. This longer sales funnel can be particularly beneficial if you’re selling high ticket items (where people typically need multiple interactions with your brand before converting).

By running a Page Post Engagement campaign on Facebook, you can get an abundance of eyeballs on your best pieces of content for a minimal cost. This can be a great way to generate initial engagement for an infographic before you start promoting it far and wide.

You can upload your mailing list to Facebook and send specific offers directly to this audience. Oftentimes, people aren’t enthusiastic to open marketing newsletters, but if they see an ad which looks interesting while scrolling through their Facebook feed, they’ll go ahead and check it out.

5. Get Conversational

A study by Ambassador reveals that 71% of consumers who’ve had a good social media experience with a company are likely to recommend it to other people.

It’s not enough to use social media as a tool for content promotion, people also expect to have their customer service queries answered by a brand’s social media account.

Reply to queries quickly and jump into conversations wherever your brand is mentioned.

Responding to negative feedback and criticism on social media is especially important. In the real world, no brand is flawless. If you can show that you take complaints seriously and you’re prepared to take action when you’re wrong, this can dramatically improve your reputation.

Article Written by Aaron Agius of Social Media Today