Social media has many different benefits for businesses: brand awareness and reach, lead generation, customer feedback, getting to know your audience, and added credibility. Because of this 92% of small businesses planned to increase their social media budgets in 2018. This figure is likely still very high today. Even though social media platforms are technically free, it will not really be free for you and your business or institution. Being active on social media takes time and care; whether it’s the time of the owners that can be spent elsewhere or if you outsource that work. Additionally, in order to make custom images, use social listening tools, content calendar planning tools, and in-depth cross-platform analytics, you will likely spend monthly on programs and services. As such, you want to make sure to get the most out of your social media investments.

Here are 6 tips to maximize your social media ROI:

1)    Set goals

This will keep you and your team accountable and drive action. If your goal for example is to increase awareness by 20% in a month, you will be motivated to check your impressions/views and follows every day to see how you are doing. It will motivate you to be efficient as well.

2)    Tailor your content and your platform choices to your intended audiences

If you want to reach GenZ, for example, a long LinkedIn article or a tweet about your CEO’s background are likely not going to capture their attention the way an Instagram story would. If your audience is broad, it will be worth it to use as many platforms as possible so that you can reach as many people as possible. But, this of course will require more investment and should be done carefully. Your content should be tailored to each platform. (To find out more about the demographics of each social platform, check out this article from Sprout Social)

3)    If your product or service is visual in nature, don’t skip on Pinterest!

Pinterest is highly underrated as a marketing tool – particularly if your audience includes crafty moms. Here are some interesting stats from omnicoreagency.com about Pinterest:

• 80% of US mothers who use the internet uses Pinterest.
• 1 out of 2 US millenials use pinterest every month.
• Half of Pinterest users earn $50K or greater per year, with 10 percent of Pinteresting households making greater than $125K.

• 83% of weekly Pinners have made a purchase based on content they saw from brands on Pinterest.
• 97% of searches on Pinterest are unbranded. This is important if you are trying to make people aware of your product that are were previously unaware of your brand.
• 90% of Pinners described Pinterest as filled with positivity.

4)    Cross-promote your brand

Make sure to link to your other profiles in your social bios and link your website to your socials. You can also easily include clickable social icons in the footers of your e-mails. Additionally, you may consider forming partnerships with other brands or with social influencers to increase your brand’s exposure.

5)    Create unique and interesting content

If creativity is not your forte, it is worth outsourcing your social media to someone with creative experience. Many users will unfollow a brand if they fail to be interesting or if their content feels irrelevant to the brand or to the user. In order promote users to follow you on multiple platforms, it is also essential to offer different valuable content on each platform. Having an active following on each platform and showing content tailored to each of those platforms shows a sense of competency that will build brand equity.

6)    Analytics. Analytics. Analytics.

Did I mention analytics? They are crucial to understanding your impact, your audience, and your progress. Get comfortable with the native analytics to the business profiles on every platform. Create custom links so that you can attribute their traffic to your website. You’ll be able to see what types of content your audience responds to best and when. There are many additional tools that can help you track your analytics across platforms. Hootsuite is a popular tool that allows you to track your brand’s mentions and sentiment, track your likes/follows/etc., respond directly to private messages to all your accounts, and to planning and scheduling posts.

• LinkedIn