habits of highly effective social media freelancers · you can also use asana for your personal...
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Habits of Highly Effective Social Media Freelancers
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S E C T I O N O N E :
Productivity tools
for freelancers
Being a freelance social media professional
means your time and focus is split among multiple
clients, channels, platforms and communities.
It can be easy to lose track, causing you to
be scattered and always rushing to meet your
deadlines. Consequently, this often leads to
important things slipping through the cracks and
you burning out.
It doesn’t have to be that way. There are so many
tools and strategies available to help you be
more organized and productive, and better at
your job overall.
Below, we break down different tactics and tools
by function to help you be more productive.
Remember, we all have different approaches to
work and productivity. The trick is to take what has
worked for other people and adapting it to your
own work style and habits.
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Plan and streamline your content a week in advance
Create a consistent flow of content for your clients
and avoid scrambling to meet deadlines last
minute by planning out each week (or month for
bigger clients) in advance. Planning takes time, of
course, but by carving out a few hours per week
to plan, you’ll always be a couple of weeks ahead
and save yourself a whole lot of stress.
Use Buffer Social Media Calendars to plan ahead
Some social media pros like to plan out what they’ll
post on social in a simple Google sheet or Excel
sheet, which is fine, but we suggest using a tool that
will publish the content directly.
Popular social media scheduling tool, Buffer
recently launched their social media calendar
feature for Awesome and Business customers.
If you’re not familiar, Buffer is a great tool that
allows you to queue up a bunch of social media
posts at once. They also share analytics on your
post performance, feeds for adding new blog
posts and more.
The calendar option allows you to visualize the
week so you can easily and quickly identify holes
in your schedule and opportunities to optimize
your content type mix.
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Create a communications calendar with Trello
When working with clients or a team, transparency
is essential. By creating a hub for everyone to see
what will be published, when and where, you’ll
save time otherwise spent answering questions
or sharing the schedule each week. This way,
everyone will be on the same page and know
where to look for the latest updates.
At CloudPeeps, we use Trello for our team-wide
communications calendar. Rather than drilling
down to specific posts, we keep it simple by listing
what types of posts go out on what day. We have
one for our general communications, and another
for social media, specifically.
Communications Calendar
Add a card ...
Monday
Email: Peep job digest
Blog: guest post1
Slack: #peepchat promo
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Facebook Page: Quote tile
Instagram: Workspace
Social schedule (CouldPeeps)
Add a card ...
Monday
Facebook Quote (morning)
Instagram: Workspace
Facebook: Curated link (afternoon)
Twitter: Freelance event
Twitter: Peepchat
Twitter: 1 x CP’s blog post
Twiiter: Curated links
Events: Check Freelance Friday (upcoming)
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Manage multiple accounts streams from HootSuite
Although Buffer is great for scheduling, it doesn’t
allow you to monitor notif ications, lists and
keyword searches like Hootsuite does. With
Hootsuite, you can monitor multiple accounts for
all of your clients and easily reply and share posts
all from one place. It connects with nearly all social
media channels, including Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, Foursquare and more.
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Batch and streamline client communications
Meetings not only take up time, they require
significant mental energy as well. Depending on
the type of meeting, they can either leave you
feeling invigorated and ready to hit the ground
running or leave you feeling drained. To avoid the
latter, here’s the steps you can take to streamline
and make the most of each client meeting:
• Schedule a standing meeting for the same
time each week with each client. Both parties
will always be prepared and have clear
expectations so time isn’t wasted.
• Share talking points for each meeting. To
keep the conversation on track, share talking
points for each discussion a few hours before
hand, then leave time for questions.
• Send a follow up. When your client asks new
questions during the talk, ask if you can email
follow up emails afterwards. This will give you
time to think them through without letting the
call throw you off track for the day.
We highly encourage having a weekly call or video
chat with your clients, as it’s an effective and quick
way to maintain trust through communication.
However, if that’s not possible, the same thing
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can be accomplished with an email. Clearly lay
out what’s been done for the week, what’s been
planned, and any questions you have.
Project manage with Asana
Project management tools can come particularly
handy when running specific campaigns for clients
that involve multiple people or moving parts.
Asana allows you to break each project into tasks,
tasks into subtasks, and assign and collaborate on
each with a team.
You can also use Asana for your personal business,
giving each client their own project, so that you’re
managing each of your to-do lists in one place.
You can then visualize your master to-do list when
planning for your week or month ahead.
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Manage your energy, not your time
Ever hear of the Pomodoro Technique? It’s a time
management technique based on four simple
principles:
• Work with time, not against it
• Eliminate burnout
• Manage distractions
• Create a better work/life balance
Productivity pro Chris Winfield wrote a thorough
and helpful post on how he’s applied Pomodoro
to his life, distilling his workweek from 40 to 16.7
hours. To effectively implement the technique, take
these steps:
• Choose just one task at a time
• Set a timer for 25 minutes
• Work on the task until the timer rings, then put
a checkmark on a tracker
• Take a five-minute break
• Repeat steps 1-4 four more times, then take a
15-minute break
Although this strategy has been proven, we
believe it can be adapted to fit the schedule of a
social media professional. Maybe rather than 25
minutes, you’re spending 45 minutes on a task,
taking a 15-minute break and repeating that three
more times, then taking another 15-minute break.
The important thing is to pay attention to how
you’re spending time. Truly focus on each task
at hand so that you’re working effectively and
productively, rather than just staying busy.
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Minimize distractions
To be truly focused on the work at hand, you need
to eliminate distractions. That means closing out
tabs, turning off Slack, ignoring social media and
going somewhere that allows you to focus. The
beauty of freelance is that you have the freedom
to do these things -- you are your own boss! Here
are a couple of tools to help you focus without
distraction:
• OneTab Chrome Extension: minimize all of
your tabs into one so that you don’t lose that
BuzzFeed article you’ve had open for three
days, but don’t find yourself tab-switching rather
than producing content or responding to tweets.
• Hey Focus: block distracting sites, like
Facebook, while you get focused-work done.
Create a productive environment
Most freelancers work remotely, meaning you’re
in complete control of your environment - so it’s
worth it to put an effort into creating a one that
makes you the most productive. That could mean
working in the quiet of your own home, in a coffee
shop with ambient noise, in a coworking space
with people bustling by, or any combination of
these scenarios.
No matter where you work, we suggest creating
a clutter-free workplace that has all the tools you
need to get the job done. Check out this collection
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of beautiful workspaces from Offscreen Magazine
for inspiration.
If certain sounds impact your productivity, here
are a few resources to help you find the music or
sound that makes you most productive.
• Cofficity : listen to the ambient sounds of a busy
coffee shop from anywhere
• Noisli: listen to the sounds of a fireplace
• Blog post: 13 bands to listen to when getting
stuff done
Optimize your efforts: Use analytics to focus on what’s working
The more you know about the effectiveness of
your work as a social media professional, the
smarter decisions you’ll make and the more you’ll
be able to streamline your work.
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Use social analytics tools like SumAll to
understand how your audience is interacting
with your content. In particular, determine:
• Where your audience is engaging the most
(which platform)
• When they’re engaging the most (what days
and times)
• What type of content is engaging them the
most (questions, quotes, jokes, serious articles)
Powered with insights like these, you’ll narrow
down the type of content you’re sharing and
sources you’re using. In other words, you’ll see
greater results with less effort.
Analytics don’t have to as daunting as you think
they might be. Make it a habit to check your
dashboard for the most important KPIs weekly, or
opt in to the weekly or daily email digest. By taking
30-60 minutes each week, you’ll gain a better
understanding of your audience and streamline
your workflow by focusing on the fewest items
with the greatest impact.
Track your time to understand where you’re spending it
If you think you might be wasting time on any one
thing, you probably are. Use a tool like Timely
or Toggl to track your time and better manage
where you’re putting efforts. If one task is taking
much longer than it should, consider outsourcing
it or finding a new tool or tactic to help you get it
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done faster. If that’s not a possibility, consider working
with your client to rescope your contract to allow for
more budget for that item or cut it out completely.
Many of the freelancers in our community swear
by RescueTime for better understanding their
habits so you can focus and be more productive
as well.
Save time finding clients with helpful resources
Finding and pitching new clients can be
overwhelming and time-consuming, especially
when you’re busy producing for existing clients.
Fortunately, there’s a number of resources
and marketplaces, like CloudPeeps, that make
discovering new clients - and letting them
discover you - much easier. Create a profile
featuring your work experience and skills, and
start browsing jobs today.
That’s it, armed with these tactics, you’ll find
yourself getting more done in less time, while
producing even better work!
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S E C T I O N T W O :
The Business of Social Media Freelancing
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Collecting & nurturing leads.
By creating an e-mail list, you can bypass search
engine algorithms, social media newsfeed filters,
and other things that can prevent your message
from being seen by your audience. Instead, you’ll
get a direct line to your potential client’s inbox!
Small business owners often underestimate the
power of being invited into their target customer’s
inbox. Although inboxes are flooded with sales
and promotional emails from retailers There is
evidence that proves that email is still one of the
best ways to engage an audience and acquire
customers.
• Email marketing yields an average 4,300%
return on investment for businesses in the
United States. (Direct Marketing Association)
• Email conversion rates are three times higher
than social media, with a 17% higher value in
the conversion. (McKinsey & Company)
• Email is nearly 40 times better than Facebook
and Twitter at acquiring customers. (McKinsey
& Company)
After reading those stats, you’re probably starting
to reconsider your email list and might even be
regretting not growing it sooner and faster. In the
world of digital marketing, your email list is a huge
part of your online business and quite frankly, the
only thing that you control. Here’s how to build
your email list and market yourself.
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Create opt-ins: tangible pieces of information like worksheets, infographics and printables that your audience can download.
You’ve seen this form of content marketing and
lead generation everywhere. They are called
lead magnets or content upgrades. Hubspot
is amazing at this. They offer tons of ebooks,
guides and whitepapers in exchange for your
email address. By collecting website visitors’
email addresses in exchange for information that
they really want to read, companies are able to
generate leads for future products and services
and nurture those leads with an email program.
To get started, use BuzzSumo and/or Google
Analytics to identify best-performing content in
your industry and create a download based on
that topic(s). You can focus specifically on a social
media platform, best practices or another topic
that would be of interest to a small business or
brand who is looking for social media management.
Whatever you create should address one of the
pain points that your potential client has.
Place Your Opt-In Forms in High Traffic Areas
The first thing you need to do is make sure that
everyone who comes to your website will be able
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to easily subscribe at any stage of their visit. Here
are some popular places to put your opt-in form.
• Website Headers – This will reach new
visitors wherever they enter your website.
• Sidebars – If your blog has a sidebar,
this is another good place that will be
seen by most of the visitors coming to
your website to see your content.
• Post Footers – When you create
quality content, people will want to
subscribe to get more of that content.
Once they finish reading a blog post,
have an opt-in form waiting for them.
• Website Footers – If someone does
decide to look at your website from top
to bottom, having an opt-in form there
might seal the deal.
• About Pages – A great about page
will likely turn a regular visitor into a
potential customer. Get them on your list
by including an opt-in form on this page.
• Newsletter Pages – If you have a
page dedicated to building your
list, you can use it in your regular
e-mail signatures, paid advertising
campaigns, and other areas to
encourage more subscribers.
Drive traffic to your lead magnet.
Use your social media channels to promote
these free tools and resources that you are using
as lead magnets and content upgrades. Drive
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traffic to your content’s landing page by sharing
it on all the channels you are already active on.
Share and reshare on Twitter, post a photo of your
new resource on Instagram, create a pin, post to
Facebook and make it prominent on your website
and within your blog posts. People can’t download,
if they don’t know it exists. You can use tools like
Leadpages or your email service provider to deliver
these downloads after you collect the email.
Create other kinds of content that you can repurpose.
Downloads aren’t the only way to collect emails.
Consider hosting a free webinar with an email
signup requirement. After you deliver your value-
packed virtual session, don’t forget to repurpose
the recording as another opt-in incentive for
those who may have missed it or are new to your
site. The same can be done with your Periscope
videos and podcasts recordings. Make a sign-up
required to view or listen to the recording.
Perfect the personalized follow-up email.
In the highly competitive social selling landscape,
the fortune is in the follow-up. Service-based
businesses, consultants, and agencies rely on
word-of-mouth promotion to be successful,
reporting that 72% of their business comes from
referrals. So what are you doing to stay relevant
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and top of mind with your current customers so
they refer you? Creating a touch point from a
personal or professional event improves your
likelihood of getting a response as well as
building rapport with your contact. Use events like
birthdays, births, vacation, relocation, promotion,
job changes, and company news to reconnect with
contacts and remain top of mind. We can barely
keep track of what’s going on in our own social
circles, making it even harder to keep abreast
of what is going on with all of our professional
contacts. There are a few tools that help you
manage all this information in a seamless way.
1. Newsle
Newsle is similar to Google Alerts in that it notifies
you whenever your friends or contacts are in the
news. Newsle’s functionality is also connected to
Linkedin’s Pulse app which curates content based on
your profile and connections while you are on the go.
2. InsideView
InsideView is a bit more in-depth than Newsle
and allows you to create a “watchlist” of people
and companies that are important to you. Similar
to Newsle, you are able to stay up-to-date on
company news.
3. Contactually
Contactually helps you better capture, manage,
and improve your professional relationships.
Through its dashboard you are able to see your
contacts from social media and email in one place,
and get templates and automated reminders to
follow up with them so you can remain top of mind.
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4. LinkedIn
If you’ve been on LinkedIn often and lately, you
will notice this relationship box appear next to the
contact info section. This just showed up for me
today as I was browsing LinkedIn and thought that
it would be a perfect and timely addition to this
post. If traditional CRM systems overwhelm you or
your budget, this is a great alternative.
12:30 PM
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Accurately Measure Your Content Marketing
Social media marketing consists of two parts:
1. Content Creation:
Creating content that is valuable to your
audience in the forms of articles, eBooks,
white papers, infographics, visuals, video,
slideshows etc.
2. Content Distribution:
The process of sharing original content with your
audience through different online and offline
channels like social media, e-mail marketing,
through your blog, in a print ad or wherever
else your audience is active and the content is
appropriate for that platform.
Once you’ve established what your content
strategy will look like, it’s time to define which
metrics will help you accurately measure and
monitor your success.
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Six metricsto effectively measure your content marketing efforts:
1. Increased Traffic
When your content is created and then distributed
to your audience, the hope is that this effort will
drive traffic back to your web properties. Measuring
an increase of organic traffic from the search
engines to your website is a worthwhile method of
determining whether the content you’re creating is
engaging enough to draw traffic to your website.
Traffic by itself doesn’t pay the bills, but it is often
a sign of what content is resonating best with your
audience. Take note of increases in non-branded
organic traffic because this is an indication of traffic
coming from the people in the search engines
looking for the types of product or services your
website offers as opposed to searching for your
business by name.
An increase in traffic is also often the result of your
content resonating well on social media, which
in turn can cause a spike in traffic to your web
properties. Traffic from the search engines is often
seen in the long-term, while traffic resulting from
social media is often seen in the short-term. Utilize
a healthy balance of both SEO and social media
to get your content in front of the right audience in
both the short and long-term.
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2. Social Interactions
A metric that allows you to better understand
whether your content is resonating with your online
audience is the amount of quality social interactions
each piece of content garners. By monitoring the
gross amount of tweets, retweets, likes, shares,
comments, mentions, and more, your business
will be able to understand what content was well
received, on what platforms and by what users.
By analyzing the social activity that is happening
around your business, you can take a look at how
these social actions are affecting your other marketing
channels as whole. For instance, your company
should know when an increase in Facebook activity
about your content is driving increased e-mail
subscribers and web traffic. Being able to accurately
attribute what channels spurred what actions across
your properties is crucial for understanding what type
of content works on what channels and how it will
affect other marketing efforts.
When it comes to the individual social channels
you are active on, monitor these top three metrics
on each network to determine the overall social
interactions occurring with your content:
Facebook:• Page Consumptions
(Clicks, Likes, Comments& Shares)
• Best Post Types• Post Reach
Twitter:• Replies• Retweets• Mentions
YouTube:
• Views• Likes/Dislikes• Comments & Favorites
LinkedIn:• Likes• Comments• Shares
Google+:• +1• Comments• Shares
Instagram:
• Likes• Comments
Tumblr:
• Reblogs• Likes• Other Social Actions
(Likes, Tweets or Shares Depending on the Tumblr)
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3. On-Site Engagement
Once traffic is driven to your website from the
variety of content you’ve distributed, take a look at
the on-site engagement that that traffic generated.
It is one thing to drive traffic to your website using
content marketing, but if that traffic doesn’t do
anything once they’ve visited your website then
the traffic isn’t qualified, interested in your offerings
or engaged enough to continue interacting.
Take a look at the traffic each individual piece of
content is driving and focus on the bounce rate,
time on site, and pages per visit of those particular
visitors. Is your traffic from content marketing stay
onsite longer than other visitors referred through
different sources? Did your traffic discover your
website through one piece of content and then
continued to look at other resources across your
website? Did visitors from content generated on
your website bounce off your website less often
or more often? Did your web visitors look at more
pages per visit when they came from content or
when your website featured more content?
Ask these questions to determine whether traffic
generated from content marketing is typically more
engaged than traffic from other sources. This is
a worthwhile way of determining if your content
marketing efforts are driving real value to your
business. If your content efforts are often the most
viewed part of your website, it might be safe to say
that your audience is finding value and that you’re
educating them on a particular expertise.
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4. Lead Generation and Subscriptions
One of the most valuable metrics to monitor when
it comes to your content marketing efforts is if your
lead generation efforts increased, as well as your
subscriptions to your e-mail list or followers to your
social media accounts.
Lead generation is important because leads are
the most likely people to convert and make your
business revenue. Revenue is the most important
measurement of your content marketing efforts
because Twitter followers, visits to your website,
e-mail subscribers, etc. don’t make you money on
their own.
By using a signup form on your website, visitors
must enter their contact information to gain access
to exclusive content created by your company
about the industry. This visitor is now a lead
that can then be added to your CMS (contact
management system) and cultivated to eventually
become a paying customer. Measure that rate at
which leads are generated from your website’s
content to see what type of content is working
and what isn’t to get more traction from your
web visitors.
Offering original content to your audience can
help build your e-mail lists and your social media
following overtime, which is beneficial to monitor
to understand what type of content your business
should create and how often it should be released.
Again, by offering original, informative, and
educational content to your audience; it motivates
them to sign up for your e-mails or follow your
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business on social media to gain access to this
exclusive content in the future. Measuring your
content marketing’s impact on your subscriber
growth can help inform future decisions on what
strategy to utilize and what value this marketing
approach really has.
5. Thought Leadership
Content marketing can define your business as the
expert or thought leader in an industry which can
lead to many valuable benefits. By consistently
releasing quality content on a topic, it can lead
to an increase in mentions and coverage by the
press who now consider your business and its
staff, experts on an industry.
Take a step back and monitor whether press
mentions of your content and business increases
overtime, if other thought leaders reference your
content, if the media is requesting your input on
certain subjects, other experts wish to contribute
to your content or if requests for your leadership to
speak an industry events are increasing overtime.
This is a strong metric to consider because it is
often difficult to quantify, but certainly defines
the success or failure of your content marketing
strategy.
Look at how your content is performing and
helping to position your company as a thought
leader. By becoming an industry known expert,
your content could continue to gain more traffic,
follows, subscriptions, leads, and conversions
overtime. Work to cultivate the growth of this
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metric to ensure a cohesive and effective content
marketing strategy.
6. Conversions
Conversions from your leads, subscribers,
followers, and visitors are what drive revenue
for your business and illustrate the true value of
your content marketing. Cultivate your leads from
social media, e-mail and web traffic in a CMS to
eventually convert them into a paying customer.
In the end, the revenue driven from your content
marketing efforts is what defines the success of
your campaigns. Conversions can occur across
many touch points in the consumer marketplace
and content helps drive your company’s unique
value throughout that experience.
Monitor the impact your content marketing has
on your conversion rate to better target your
audience, educate them on your expertise and
turn them into customer advocates.
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Translate Your Social Media Reports into Action
The amount of data and tools that are available
is overwhelming and can cause some business
owners, marketers, and even social media
professionals to do minimal reporting to get by. We
know a lot of you like to wing it on social media,
but numbers are important for:
• Tracking progress
• Proving that strategies or campaigns are
working (or not working)
• and if you’re a consultant or freelancer,
sometimes it’s the difference between keeping
or losing a client.
Numbers speak louder than words. We at SumAll
have the Reports and Insights products, which
help you save time by adding your most important
social and web traffic numbers, rendering them
in beautiful, easy-to-share PDFs. Are you used to
combing through Excel spreadsheets or having
to go to Facebook then Twitter and not even
knowing what’s happening on Instagram? That
can be frustrating, so I will walk you through how
I use SumAll Insights to inform our social media
strategy and activities.
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Look for peaks.
The first thing I do is look at the Overview to
identify peaks for social reach, social engagement,
and for our web traffic. Then, I look to see what
was posted on those particular days to spike
those numbers. This allows me to understand the
content that our audience responds to and the
kind that we can continue to create.
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Quantify your progress.
The Overview and Reach pages helps me ensure
that we are on track to hit our goals for that
particular time period. For example, if I want to
increase our Instagram followers by 100 each
month, I know that I need to get at least 25 new
followers each week. A glance at the Overview
pages allows me to verify that improvements are
being made.
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Don’t reinvent the wheel.
One thing that I love about SumAll Insights is that
the content page takes the guesswork out of
what’s working well for each platform. It tells me
my best Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook post as
well as the best times to post. In order to continue
growing you have to take risks and try new things,
but you also want to have a good understanding
of what your audience wants and needs. Knowing
my top posts allows me to identify trends in the
days/times they were posted and the kind of
content that it is. I adjust our content calendar
accordingly.
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Nurture your leads.
Let’s face it. A social CRM isn’t always in the
budget of a startup or small business, thus social
media managers need to get creative with how
they track and engage with the top contributors
in their community. I use Audience Engagement
to identify the contributors and curate them in a
Twitter list to ensure that I greet them over the
following few weeks. These are also users that I
will send some swag, thank you notes and other
fun surprises during campaigns and initiatives
throughout the year.
Going through your report and making adjustments
like these requires only 30 minutes of your time
each week.
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This ebook was made in collaboration with CloudPeeps
About SumAll
In 2011, SumAll was founded on the belief that
everyone, not just huge enterprises, should have
unrestricted access to their data to improve their
business and lives. Since then, we have embarked
on a mission to unlock and democratize data
for everyone. We have developed a powerful
data analytics tool that allows our customers to
view all of their data in one simple, easy-to-use
visualization.
About CloudPeeps
Founded in 2014, CloudPeeps is a talent
marketplace that matches businesses with the
world’s top freelance marketing, content and
community professionals. Their platform matches
a community of expert freelancers with businesses
who value them, so they can create meaningful
work together.
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