Trying to build up your social media pages but confused by all the acronyms and marketing jargon?
I’m here to cut through the confusion and give you a basic understanding of 10 terms that I think are key for anyone using social media for promotion purposes. Whether you’re working on social media marketing for your business or a personal project, these 10 terms are worth understanding to help you make the most out of your social media pages.
1. B2B and B2C
First things first, it’s important to understand whether your company is B2B or B2C, B2B means Business to Business and B2C means Business to Consumer.
Do you sell your products/services directly to the consumer or do you sell to other businesses? Your audience is the key factor in everything you do so establishing this will determine what social media platforms you should be active on and how you communicate with them.
2. Reach
Reach shows you the number of people who have seen your posts. Unfortunately, not all your social media followers see every post you put up, so reach is a great indicator to help you understand how many people each of your posts are actually reaching.
By keeping a close eye on this metric you can see which of your posts are getting more reach and then you can optimise your content to help improve your visibility.
3. Engagement Rate
Where reach shows you how many people are seeing your posts, engagement rate shows you how many people are engaging with your content, either from liking, commenting, or sharing.
By monitoring both your reach and engagement rate you can see how many people are seeing your post and then how many of those are actually interacting with your content in some way. The higher the engagement rate usually means that your content is good, plus you have a good quality of followers who are actually interested in what you’re saying and engaging with it.
A good engagement rate will help build your industry credibility online and help you to improve your reach to a wider audience.
4. CTA (Call To Action)
A call to action is effectively what action you want your audience to take once they’ve seen your content. In social media posts this is usually in the form of a link to a website or landing page, or a button to encourage them to contact you or purchase.
A call to action needs to grab your audience’s attention and it needs to be extremely clear what you want them to do. The easier you make it for your audience to carry out the desired action, the more likely they are to do it.
However, not every single social media post needs to have a call to action. Some posts may consist of nicely branded images or quotes, that are designed more towards focusing on reach and engagement. It's important to not bombard your followers with salesy buy now, click now, call now posts constantly.
It's important to include informative posts, such as sharing industry related information, or a nice company image with a quote, or tips on things relevant to your audience, balanced with posts that include call to actions for your services or products,
5. CTR (Click Through Rate)
This is in relation to your social media ads, the click through rate calculates the number of times your link was clicked on in relation to the number of people that content was displayed to.
This statistic helps you to understand how well your social ads are working, if your impressions are high but your click through rate is low, then you know that something needs to be adjusted to make the content of your ad more relevant to your audience. This could mean changing your audience targeting, or it could mean trying different content to appeal more to your target audience.
6. CPC (Cost Per Click)
This is another metric for social media advertising, also used for search engine marketing, this helps you to evaluate how successfully your ads are performing.
Cost per click is displayed to show the average cost of each link click based upon the overall campaign budget that you set. If you have a high click through rate and a low cost per click, then it shows that your social media ads are successfully encouraging the target audience to engage and take your desired action.
7. Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is a small free giveaway that is offered to potential customers in exchange for specific details, usually simply an email address.
The giveaway is normally something like a whitepaper, how-to guide, e-book or template. Basically something of value to your target audience that will make them want to leave their contact details in order to be able to read or use your free giveaway.
This tool will help you capture the details of new potential customers for you to then nurture through your digital marketing.
8. KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators)
Key Performance Indicators are used across all types of marketing campaigns and are put in place to help understand the performance of your campaigns.
You choose your KPI’s yourself and they can be in place to monitor any type of analytic you feel will be useful. For social media this could be your engagement rate, click through rate, cost per click, or conversions to a paying customer.
Whatever you choose for your KPI's make sure you keep these up to date and track them, as it will help you to adjust your efforts where you notice areas that aren't performing quite as well.
9. Hashtag #
Most people are familiar with this term by now, but I thought it worth adding on here as it is a really useful tool to help your social posts reach a wider audience.
Hashtags are used to group relevant topics together, so when people search for a specific topic, hashtags related to that will show up in their search. Clicking on a hashtagged word will take the user to a search page including all other posts with that hashtag.
Keep hashtags short and simple, too wordy or long can take the effectiveness away. Don’t just throw a load of hashtags in a post haphazardly, they need to be relevant to the content of your post, otherwise they won’t be as effective. Also if you decide to use hashtags in your posts, it is vital that your page or account is set to public, as private accounts won’t show up in hashtag searches.
10. Retargeting
Retargeting in social media is where your ads are targeted specifically to those who have already interacted with your social pages or website, but not converted into a paying customer. For example they may have visited a page but not gone on to contact you, or not gone on to purchase a product.
And that's it for now...
Social Marketing can be a bit of a minefield when you start delving into it, and it can seem quite daunting when you’re first trying to get your head around it. However understanding the terms above can help you to start your social media campaigns off the right way and monitor their performance to truly gain the most out of these amazing platforms.
Still got questions? Drop me a message or a call if you'd like some advice or I can help you to make a plan or start with your social media strategy.
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