As with all marketing efforts, return on investment (ROI) is key.
With almost 58 million Americans using social media every single day, there is a huge audience to be tapped in social channels. But your focus can’t be just on which channel connects you with your followers. You need to evaluate the type of device as well.
Research shows that one in every three Facebook user accesses the social network from their mobile device. In fact, 91% of mobile internet usage is for social networking, compared to just 79% on personal computers.
But this information is only helpful if companies know what part of their marketing strategy is working, as well as what type of devices are accessing their pages. Let’s look at how you can know what’s best for your business.
Personal Computer vs. Mobile
More and more users are migrating to mobile for their social interactions, but still a large number are utilizing PCs to maintain their networks.
Gartner.com reports that the number of mobile devices is expected to surpass the number of PCs by 2017. And, the variety of mobile devices and mobile operating systems are gaining steam, as well as the ease of purchasing one. For example, where PCs are typically only sold by computer retailers, mobile devices from smartphones to tablets, can also be purchased through wireless carriers.
The point is that the divide between devices forces companies attempting to reach their audience through social networking to look for the best way to reach potential and current customers.
Monitoring Your Audience
Depending on your product or service and your target audience, you may need to focus your social marketing on PCs, mobile, or a combination of the two. You may also need to know what social networks work better and what content is best suited for your audience and device.
That’s why monitoring usage is so important. We all know that Google rules the roost when it comes to online searching, but with their massive infrastructure, they also are one of the best tools for analyzing your site and other online marketing efforts. Best of all, Google Analytics is free to use.
With Google Analytics, you can measure more than just clicks and retweets. Once you set up your account, you can set it to track traffic coming from your various social networks. It has the ability to delve much farther into the data, informing business owners of these important details:
- Location – Know where your visitors are coming from. Not just country, but the state and even the city. This can give you insight into where you can hold meet-ups or where to target your location-specific ads.
- Social Network – If you get a ton of traffic from Facebook and very little from Twitter, then your social marketing dollars would be best spent on your Facebook ads and posts, rather than wasted on networks that are not working for you.
- Platform Source – This is a big one, because it will tell you how much of your traffic is coming from PCs or mobile devices. This gives you the statistics directly from your audience, so you know how to format your posts, simplify your contest forms for different devices and encode your videos so that they show up better on a computer or a mobile device.
Knowledge is Power
When it comes to marketing, the more you know about your audience, the more focused your efforts can be.
When you aren’t wasting money and time going after the wrong people on the wrong social networks with the wrong devices, and when you really concentrate your spend on your customer base only, you can see much better results with the same budget.
Tracking social across devices is smart marketing. But smarter still is the return on investment it gives you.
Image Source: Placeit.net
