Research and planning is as vital in social media sites as it is in other forms of advertising and marketing. Every community is unique and will not respond in the same way. Though it may not be easy to keep track of the ROI of social media promotions, you should always have a set of goals. What do you want to attain with the social media content ? What impact do you wish to have? Why do you want to use social media websites? Do you want to:
Increase your newsletter or RSS subscribers?
If your plan involves increasing newsletter and RSS subscribers, you need to know the websites where users are likely to be familiar with RSS readers. Users of social news websites such as Reddit and Digg will be more likely to subscribe to RSS feeds compared to users of social network websites such as Facebook and MySpace.
Sell a service or product?
Do you wish to sell a particular service or product? You may attract traffic from several social news websites. However, are the users likely to buy anything when they visit your website or are they just looking for entertainment? If you are selling a product, it might be wiser to use social shopping websites and to contact influential bloggers within your niche. This was one of my main considerations when selecting a social media site to promote my Medifast discounts, Bistro MD promo codes and Diet to Go coupons.
Increase your site/brand recognition?
Do you want your brand name or website to be recognized instantly? You can use video and social news sites to help spread word about your brand or company. However, you need to have clear goals about what you wish to attain from this brand recognition.
Create a community?
Do you wish to create a community? If so, you will need to research on the best ways of engaging your audience . Do you want your readers to create content or do you just want more comments on your blog? If you want to see more comments, ask your readers for their opinions. If you want readers to write content for your website, you will need to the provide tools they need to do this.
You may want people to visit your website for more reasons than the ones listed above. The important thing is that you need to define your goals before creating content and submitting it to various social media websites. If you have no idea what your goals are, neither will your audience. Whatever your goals, you should have a clear and direct call to action.
What are your social media goals ?
This is a guest post by Charles Mburugu, check out our guidelines to guest post on WebTrafficROI
Image credit: Cambodia4kidsorg
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