How are you going to define social media marketing success?

Social media marketing should never be just “something that you should do.” As a small business owner if you do follow trends in Internet marketing circles then you may very well have come across well-meaning advisors and experts, who tell you that you really do need to be involved in social media marketing or you’re going to be on the outside looking in, in some way. While this may very well be true, it’s not reason by itself for engaging.

As in any other marketing related effort you have to be able to measure success. You have to be able to define the path ahead and understand whether or not you have been successful in retrospect.

The first thing that you need to understand is how you are going to define success in the first place. You may be used to defining it according to how many sales you are able to achieve, how many conversions, how many calls to the campaign-related freephone number you received and so on.

How are you going to redefine expectations in terms of social media marketing? You may very well realise that brand building is a primary goal here. As you will have a number of different initiatives under consideration at the same time it may be rather difficult to measure a straight action to conversion ratio. Nevertheless, you can still determine whether a particular effort is successful in many different ways. For example, what level of interaction and response did you get during a particular guest blogging spot on an authority blog site in your sphere? How many new members were you able to attract for your Facebook page, after you instigated a certain campaign? The definition of success in your case might be the number of contacts that you are able to build up purely as a consequence of an educational campaign that you instigated.

It’s important to remember that social media marketing is in the process of becoming a key – many would say essential – element of any marketing push.

Your virtual assistant can help you to track relevant success according to the parameters that you set at the outset. You always have to be realistic and understand that much of this marketing approach is nonconventional.

While there are definite steps to take to instigate a social media marketing campaign, a great deal of the effort associated is involved in monitoring and listening. You should expect a certain response for every effort made, but also understand that once responses are received and “buzz” created this often requires additional efforts, conversations and actions.

In the broader analysis of social media marketing, the virtual assistant has two very clear, yet essential roles. One is to create, generate and promote the message and the other is to listen attentively and amend future actions based on response and feedback. It can all be a very time-consuming process for the harried businessman or woman, but a logical and very important project for a virtual assistant team member.