Page 4 - St Maur marketing and social media thoughts.
P. 4
Setting Goals and Expectations
What should your social media goals be?
The ultimate goal has to be financial. It’s tough to make money directly from social media, but you can still use it to generate sales of your products.
Generating ‘likes’, ‘followers’ or ‘subscribers’ is all very well and provides a nice little ego boost, but non-financial metrics don’t pay the bills.
An inevitable (and vital!) part of my being a ‘professional’ photographer is the ability to make money from it. You could spend thousands building your brand and never see a penny of income if you don’t do it right.
Goals should be SMART - Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.
“What gets measured gets done” That’s something I believe is very important whenever you set yourself a goal in life, If you make a New Year’s resolution to lose weight, for example, what would be the point if you never stepped on the scales? Every goal needs some measurement to assess progress.
The same goes for your social media usage. You might decide to use the automatic app on your iPhone to measure screen time, or you might create bookmarks for the stats pages on your social media accounts. However, what you really need are two things that you’ll rarely get from the automated statistics bundles:
• The ability to connect social media usage with sales or profit.
• The ability to assess social media usage and sales by the individual
The reason these two things are so important is that, as mentioned before, what gets measured gets done. You need to know what the financial return is on your social media activity. Measuring that globally is all very well, but it would be much more powerful to customise mail shots to individual customers or customer segments based on their individual needs and histories.
Researching your Audience
I was recently doing a review of the social media of a client who would tell me “we have all these followers but they don't buy anything” A quick study of their followers on Facebook shown they were mainly existing friends of my client who were interested, nosey or supportive. While this was great to start to have the support things only started to grow when these core friends started posting about the brand and sharing the brands content with their friend. From that point on the “type” of followers changed as the second, third and fourth generation followers were genuinely interested in the product and soon became engaged. This is a key point which I will come back to later.
Written by Jeremy Pascoe @ Walking Gun Photography