Are you involved in digital marketing? You can’t just read blogs and learn what the experts recommend. Their advice is often very general, and might not apply to you. You need to test different marketing strategies out. See what works on what medium, and why.
Let’s say you find out that Twitter makes it easy to get followers for a particular account, but Facebook doesn’t. In such a case, it might make more sense to scale your efforts, and put more efforts into your Facebook account where you get a better return on your investment.
Another interesting angle, is that certain types of posts do well on certain mediums. If you are digital marketing, the medium most central to your endeavors should be your blog. But, your blog might have many types of articles. So, making a blanket statement of how Facebook is the best medium to promote your blog might not be a very good answer. Posts with lots of amazing pictures might do better on Instagram or Stumbleupon. Posts that have practical marketing pointers might do better on Linked In. Twitter tends to be good for SEO popularity due to the links you tweeted. Facebook tends to have the widest audience and is the social medium I would try first — for any industry just because it has the largest active following.
Generalized analytics results might not be the most helpful for your business. It is good to dig a little better. See what does well on each medium, and why!
After a recent analysis, I realized that the amount of labor and monetary investment that I had put into Twitter, the results were far less than those for our Facebook which we had invested relatively little into. I’ve decided to experiment by putting four times the effort into our Facebook for a month, and toning down my Twitter. Additionally, I learned that my fledgling Linked In accounts are delivering great results, and that I should build those to the point where they have critical mass, so that I can see if they deliver a value that merits the investment that we are putting into them.
It is hard to compare different social media accounts when some are just bigger than the others. If your Facebook has 10,000 members, and your new Linked In account has only 200, it is hard to compare where an hour of your time will go the furthest. Your Facebook will probably get you the most clicks. But, on the other hand, with Linked In, you can post on other people’s communities which might have a larger reach than your Facebook account. You are comparing apples and octopuses here!
If you are comparing the benefit of an hour of work with a large network and small network consider this. The hour you spend on a large network might get you some fruit (perhaps apples & oranges for example) while the effort you put into a smaller network might get you growth which also has a value that you can calculate based on future anticipated fruits once the network has grown to however you define its maturity. If you know how many quality clicks you get from your smaller network, then you can guess how many clicks you’ll get when it has grown to be of a substantial size. You can estimate its value by knowing that click rate.
The bottom line is that you need to try different social media mediums, try different approaches, see what works, why, and how long it takes for something to work. Try to estimate after 18 months of effort, what type of return you’ll get on your work.