One simple way to fine-tune your social media strategy in 2023

If you’ve made any kind of business-focused resolution for 2023 that involves reinventing your social media, communications or content strategies, this is the perfect time to stop and reflect.

Consider this. One of the easiest ways to improve your social media performance and change direction (for the better) is to:
Evaluate. Enhance. Evolve.

This year your team could commit to:

• Doing more of what already works well;
• Pausing activities that are ineffective and/or deliver low business value; and
• Pursuing the lowest-hanging fruit for improvement.

If it’s so straightforward, why isn’t everyone doing it? These approaches depend on a social media audit to understand your current performance and in which areas you are not keeping pace with your competitors and leading brands. Not through high-level subjective opinion, but in a clearly defined way, guided by meaningful analysis.

Regularly evaluating your social media performance is crucial if you are serious about building brand profile, maximising engagement and growing audience.

When Quiip helps our clients assess their social media performance and progress towards best practice, we call it a Social Media Maturity Assessment.

You can’t improve without knowing where you stand

If you feel like you need another holiday just from thinking about the idea of conducting a deep dive into what’s working, and not working, that’s understandable!

It’s a tricky piece of work that requires knowledge of social media strategy, best practice and platform trends, combined with a deep-seated confidence in being able to make both quantitative and qualitative judgements about the effectiveness of your social media engagement.

On the first day of January 2023, marketing guru Seth Godin used his popular blog to muse about how easy it is to accept the status quo — to convince ourselves that the work required to make things better is too costly, because we’re afraid of change. Godin said: “And the real fears of change are that it might work (which is scary) and that it might not work (which is heartbreaking).”

Evaluating and benchmarking your social media performance, in the interests of driving continuous improvement, may not be comfortable thing to do. But is critical to your long-term success.

Unless you understand which changes are worth pursuing, you risk making only superficial changes or just adding more to your plate — with no realistic grounding as to why. For instance, by launching a profile on a new platform your CEO is curious about.

Yes, all marketing and communications teams should leave room for experimentation, innovation and trying new things. But the core of your work should be focused on efforts that deliver real and lasting cut-through with target audiences and deliver on your marketing and communications goals.

Social media maturity is a nuanced, business-wide performance measure

Savvy leaders recognise that thriving social communities inform and drive customer engagement, customer care, product development, revenue and brand advocacy – because online communities are increasingly the way that people interact with your business or cause.

A recent Harris Poll survey found more than 90 percent of executives are looking to increase social media marketing budgets and that 85 percent expect to leverage their online communities as a primary source of business intelligence.

Reaching the point where social media communities can have a powerful impact across your business operations doesn’t happen overnight or without intentional effort. And getting bigger also doesn’t always mean a community gets stronger.

Cultivating cohesion, positive sentiment and shared values across communities requires sophisticated community management skills and tactics, applied consistently over time.

How do you know if your approach is fostering a genuine sense of community and brand loyalty? There’s no single metric that points to that. You need a holistic assessment of your journey towards best practice.

How does Quiip do its social media maturity assessment?

Assessing your social media maturity is a more in-depth exercise than your day-to-day reporting on performance and is helpful for any organisation with an active social media presence of 12 months or more. It offers strategic insights, benchmarking guidance and opportunity identification to enable a substantive refinement and evolution of your social media approach.

Here are some key activities which Quiip tends to include in our social media maturity assessments:

• Auditing your social media activity across all channels within a specific time frame, including how you present content, use different functionality, engage with your audience and moderate interactions.

• Weighing up quantitative metrics including community size, engagement rate and demographics alongside a broader analysis of factors like the depth of connection and the extent to which your community fosters loyal brand ambassadors.
• Evaluating performance based on industry best practice and in context of your business goals, marketing objectives and social media purpose.
• Considering the quality and success of different types of content.

The end result is a detailed report that: analyses the performance of each channel; provides a visual matrix so you can see how you rank overall on a five-point maturity scale for a range of attributes (like Engagement and Customer Care); and provides a SWOT analysis with guidance on where to improve and what to prioritise.

Previously we’ve also included an in-depth analysis of competitors’ social media – whether that’s rivals, communities of a similar size/target audience, or even inspirational global brands.

You need nuanced insights if you want to increase social media engagement, build an online community that people care about, and deliver on your strategic goals in 2023.

Before you commit to changes in 2023, talk to us about assessing your social media maturity to ensure learnings that push you towards best practice and your strategic goals. If you’d like to book a meeting with our senior team, head to our calendly.