In the second instalment of this five-part series on measuring return on investment of your social media efforts, Mark Cameron looks at an important step in the process: building an audience (and how to deal with the inevitable trolls). In case you missed it, catch up with Part One here.

The first article in this social media ROI series discussed how to develop metrics for social media activity and measure whether you are achieving successful outcomes. This second article looks at how to grow your audience.

Social media marketing can be very effective if the strategy is sound and the execution is well managed. But that is not enough. There are now over a billion Facebook users worldwide and over 55% of the Australian population now has a Facebook account. That doesn’t mean they will all ‘like’ your page. Growing your social media following takes time and effort. Having a lot of followers on Facebook doesn’t necessarily translate into sales either, but it is a very important step along the conversion journey. There are a number of now well-defined principles for ensuring you effectively engage your audience and, by doing so, see it grow.

It’s not about you

The key to developing a high quality community is understanding that your audience is your most valuable asset. Yes, they have connected with you to find out more about your brand – but for the brand to remain relevant it needs to fit into people’s lives. The saying ‘the customer is always right’ is especially true in social media. Your brand is entering social media to engage with your audience. If you simply talk about yourself or try to sell, sell, sell, you’ll end up like looking like the boring guy at the party.

Inclusion

It is important to make your audience feel respected and tell them they are part of something that’s fun. The audience members are not ‘fans’ – they have influence.

Everyone wants to belong to something fun and exciting. So make it that way.

Invite conversation

Some brands have been slow to adopt social media. They have been afraid that their audience may express negative views. The problem with that perspective is that, by failing to provide your customers a forum to have their say, you are, in effect, censoring them. This is not a great idea if you want to build relationships and grow your customer base. You are much better off inviting conversation and dealing with negative opinions openly and honestly.

Be clear on the rules

Engaging with your audience doesn’t mean that you have to put up with the inevitable trouble makers that online media seems to successfully attract. In your brand community, irrespective of the social media platform you are using, it pays to be up front and clear about what is acceptable and what is not. If you have to remove a comment, let everyone, including the person who wrote it, know why you took it down.

Use apps

If you are not using apps on your Facebook page you are missing out on a big opportunity to generate value. The ‘Big Data’ that apps can generate is really the start of the conversion process and a key determinant of the ROI. We’ll discuss this point in more detail in the next article in this series.

Develop a content plan

Growing your social media audience requires that you to publish content. Approaching this in an ad hoc way is a formula for failure. There is nothing worse than seeing the Facebook page of a brand that has been ignored because a clear plan was not in place. In the end, growing your audience really boils down to common sense, proper planning, clear strategy, good execution and the willingness to spend some time and money. But the really clever part comes next – once you step back, look at the data that you have collected from your audience and work out how to use it to generate sales. That’s for my next article.

In case you missed it, you can catch up with Part One here, or continue to Part Three, ‘Keeping your audience engaged‘.