EverythingAlmost.com

Anyone who ever wondered whether social media were a shallow place full of superficial thoughts and insignificant ideas, you might be wrong.

It is a great place to gather audience sentiment and track engagement across multiple channels. You can also compare your marketing results against virtually every other channel.

Grant Cadone is an entrepreneur and influencer. The author, speaker and founder of the 10X Growth Conference (which has a net worth exceeding $300 million), told me that social media is a great tool for marketers.

“The benefits of social media is that it allows the creator to control the volume and velocity of the messaging as well as a real time response on how the audience receives the messaging. TV and radio are still either unwilling or unable to even give you a real count as to who heard or saw your messaging, much less provide real time engagement,” he says.

Cardone is right. As a quick tangent, it’s worth explaining how this all works. Let’s say you have a new company called Wonderbar. There are a million ways to market your brand. Although you may be able to run ads on television and radio, the transmission of those advertisements is difficult to trace. While anyone can watch or hear the advertisement from any location, the industry is still working on a way to make it easy for people to find out where the ads are being sent. Everywhere interaction.

Every click, view and like on social media can be traced back. “Reach” is an Measurements exactIt is important to know how frequently the content appears in front people. Wondering whether Wonderbar has a particular audience appeal? This is how you can discover. A new campaign is being launched to give away a free sample. You can track every single metric with social media. Email marketing is the only marketing channel that offers better analytics about how campaigns have performed.

There’s one big difference. I’ve been saying this for years, but one of the key reasons why Facebook is so successful from a revenue standpoint is that the ad management system they provide is second to none. Email can’t touch it. An ad can be shown to one target audience and then compared to another.

Cardone noted that tracking social media accounts is important for both paid and organic social media. Cardone pointed out how organic content can be more profitable. An organic post could go viral, reaching millions of people, while a paid social advertising campaign only goes so far. Organic has no limitations. 

“I will take the reach from organic over paid any day of the week,” says Cardone. “I have never considered social less valuable than paid and anyone who says it clearly does not know how to effectively run a social program that converts and monetizes traffic.”

Cardone pointed out, however that tracking is not an end goal. Social media campaign managers often believe that success means a large number of followers. We all do this. A campaign can only be considered valuable if it has hundreds of likes or comments.

Cardone believes that it is most likely the most overlooked aspect.

“The problem with social media is there are so many people who are satisfied with views, likes and comments,” he says. “None of those mean much to me. I am interested in reach, repetition of messaging, and the offer converting the relationship to either a customer or an investor.”

Cardone advises that marketing must also consider the audience. Do they prefer reels or stories? Are they more comfortable with livestream video? You can dig deep into the metrics to find out with social media. According to him, marketers should use every social channel and track their success across all platforms. It’s important to be consistent. He says you won’t be able to capture an audience if you only post once or twice per week.

Cardone also mentioned how it’s important to use all digital platforms. Cardone noted that his company had sent over 400,000,000 email in 2021. The sweet spot in digital marketing often occurs when digital platforms complement and support each other. He said that YouTube was the only platform that he’d choose over all other platforms.

It’s not easy to get started. While Wonderbar may not have been ready for TikTok, Clubhouse or Clubhouse yet, Cardone made a wonderful point. The earlier you begin building relationships, tracking engagement and seeing conversions, then the better.