Monitor your way to success: why professionals need to analyse their social media feedback

Accountants and lawyers, have been quick to embrace the power of social media in their marketing plans over the last two years.

However, as this online phenomenon has grown it no longer pays to just post blindly and forget. Firms need to monitor the success of their campaigns and use the technology on offer to enhance their digital profile.

As more potential clients use online posts as guidance for which firm to choose, practices must gear their social media to stand out from their competitors and use it as a tool to present their expertise.

Whilst most firms maintain active social media feeds online, the ones that achieve the greatest success are those that take time to monitor the data behind their posts and adapt their approach in line with these.

As with all things, it is not necessarily quantity, but rather the quality of content that truly matters.

For some, success is as simple as changing the time of day that they post, while for others it could be the use of an innovative new hashtag, but the key message is that firms should not rely upon potluck and chance to improve their engagement.

There are a variety of tools on offer to partners and business development managers, both paid for and free, to assist them with this task these include big names like Hootsuite, through to smaller players, such as BuzzSumo.

Twitter, Facebook and Google also offer their own in-house analytics programmes, but for those looking to dig deeper and gain more insights, additional software tools may be more beneficial, so it is worth exploring what options may be open to you for your various platforms.

By using these tools firms are often able to analyse their posts and learn more about customer engagement, be it their geographic location, employment background, gender or even the most common sites that they visit or the feeds that they interact the most with.

Using this data they can build profiles for certain groups and develop strategies based upon these profiles.

For example, if you are looking to target business owners in the North who are male and between the age of 21 and 30 then you might find that a common thread between them is that on average they are more likely to log on to their feed at 5pm and are likely to look at posts featuring a video.

Using this data you can then implement a series of posts aimed directly at this group, thus improving your chance of lead generation.

When social media monitoring is used properly it can help to boost your brand, drive engagement and grow a firm’s following online organically, removing ‘chance’ completely from the equation of success or failure.

Social media monitoring is also essential in monitoring the impact of competitor brands and can highlight where they are acquiring new clients from, so that your own practice can counteract their success with your own engagement within the same client groups.

While all of this sounds particularly complex and the reserve of specialist social media marketing executives, all firms, regardless of their size, should conduct some form of social media monitoring and analytics.

With the free tools on offer and a little common sense, anyone can make improvements to their online brand in minutes – it really isn’t rocket science.

Firms hoping to learn more about the ever-changing trends and tools on social media should seek to expand their knowledge with continued professional development.