The past decade has seen a meteoric shift in the manner that people interact and converse, with social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn making it easier than ever for the global world to interact with one another.

The reality of this shift has created huge opportunities for businesses of all industries, who can now enjoy marketing their companies on a worldwide scale, to a global audience, with an ever-growing number of people to encourage purchases from. Moreover, creating strong business profiles on social media platforms can allow marketers to establish deeper and closer relationships with their customer base than ever before, and can induce higher levels of loyalty and purchases through intelligent use of membership incentivising on profile pages, and regular engagement with those who follow them.

However, deciding which platforms to use, which to leave and how to successfully use these profiles to encourage sales and new membership can often be difficult, and many marketers fail to attain the traction they could if they were to manage their social media campaigns better.

The following page will provide an expert insight into the things you should consider when embarking on a supplementary social media campaign to your other digital marketing endeavours, in order to ensure that you acquire the largest possible reward from your efforts.

1)  Target your campaign and don’t just go for the numbers game. A lot of social media platforms will give you a chance to boost the reach of your posts to a number of user profiles across the globe, usually done so on a pay-per-boost basis. This is true of Facebook and Twitter, but you should keep in mind that when it comes to social media marketing, more is not necessarily better and in a lot of cases can end up being a costly waste of time. This is because without targeting your posts and advertisements on profiles of people who have publically displayed an interest with your niche, company or industry matters, you will simply be spending money boosting posts that will be overlooked immediately by a number of poorly targeted people. Obviously, use your connections to your advantage and encourage them to like your page at the outset of your campaign, but do not spend a ton of money boosting posts that are poorly targeted.

The better route to take is to analyse the likes and preferences of people in different geographic areas, and boost your posts accordingly, to give your company the best chance of attracting attention from people more likely to give it just that.

2) Consider the revolutionary new amplification sites such as Taboola and Outbrain in order to bolster the exposure of your new content in a cost-effective manner. On sites such as these, you can pay for links to your content to be present on the site pages of the internet’s biggest content publishers including ESPN, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and many more national institutions. The greater the intrigue of your content, the more traffic you will generate, and subsequently the amount you are recommended around the ‘net will soar.

3) Regularly update and monitor your social media campaigns. This will usually mean that you should allocate some form of manager to run your social media profiles, who can make regular improvements and posts to keep your audience engaged. Having a manager will also mean that if any problems arise in regards to your company’s reputation or spamming on your profile pages, that these can be remedied and dealt with in a quick manner which won’t put your entire campaign at risk.

Producing original graphics to supplement your posts will have a huge effect on the amount of people who are attracted to clicking on them, as research and personal experience have both shown me. And of course releasing regular content, at carefully chosen times which have proven to attract the most engagement will ensure that you build up a loyal following, who visit your profiles regularly to engage with your material.

4)  Utilise analytics to determine whether to leave a specific platform. For example, evaluate other areas of your marketing which you are currently spending money on to try and build up your brand, and see how the conversion rates compare across these platforms. PPC advert rates, advertising via the media, and email promotions are other ways of trying to reach an audience, and you should compare your social media user conversion rates to see whether it is worth investing more of your money or not. Conversion percentages on social media profiles into repeat business is one of the many analytical metrics you can consider in order to decide whether it is worth carrying on advertising on a certain social media platform, or whether it would be more beneficial to go somewhere else.

5) If you decide to stop using a platform, make sure you take the customer base you have acquired with you. Just because analytics has shown that it is not profitable using a certain platform, does not mean you have to concede all inroads you have made with your current campaigns. Seeing as you have already established meaningful customer relationships with certain individuals, you should take steps to ensure that they are seamlessly facilitated and directed to your new platform of choice. You can do this by announcing that you are leaving and encouraging them to visit your new page, or simply put a re-direct onto the old page.