Using a CMS to improve your social media engagement
There are now more than 2 billion active social media users in the world. A good social media strategy can bring you in touch with at least some of them, while the social capabilities offered by some content management systems (CMSs) can be a key tool in your efforts to increase engagement as well as provide invaluable insights.
Likes, follows, comments and other digital seals of approval may not always translate to tangible business outcomes, but a content-led social strategy, underpinned by the CMS, certainly has value as it can extend your reach beyond your core audience and increase your exposure.
It also enables conversations with your audience, so you can get to know them better on a personal level. These direct interactions give your business a face and solidify your brand identity. If you’re more interested in the tangible benefits of having a sound social strategy, consider this: your presence on social networks may have an impact on how you rank on search engines.
With a CMS, you can knit together the social interactions of your audience, which gives you insights into your customers’ behaviour, their needs and what they think of your brand, in a place where they’re being most frank. In this post, we’ll explain how the right strategy can help you convert the merely interested into the engaged, delighted customer, and how a CMS can help you achieve it.
Post content easily across all networks
By connecting all your social accounts – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – to a CMS with integrated social capabilities, you can automatically publish any content from the platform directly to those networks. This feature alone is worth its weight in the time it saves your content team, who only have to hit publish once. It also ensures your brand identity is maintained across channels.
Build richer profiles of your customers
One of the main benefits of the CMS is that it lets you get to know your customer better. The right social tool in your CMS can link any interactions by your customers on social networks with the profiles you currently have in your database.
This will show you how they feel about your brand, give context to their interactions, determine which customers you should get in touch with – might they be leads? – and see what content is resonating with which sections of your audience.
This insight into audience behaviour also gives you the ability to personalise the content you serve your customers, such as paid social ads, to suit them. Some social integrations offered by content management systems will let you schedule publishing content at a later time, according to the insights you get, or make suggestions for when to post, so that you get the maximum engagement with your content.
Get a wide view on how your customers are engaging with your content
Encouraging discussion around your brand on social media can be a great way of determining how it is perceived by consumers, especially as they’re more likely to be frank in a social space. With the right CMS capabilities, you can monitor these customer interactions and keep tabs on mentions of specific keywords or hashtags.
Monitor paid search campaign performance
Marketers are dedicating an increasing amount of ad spend to paid social campaigns. With more than $30 billion invested in the medium in 2016, how can marketers give themselves the best chance of achieving return on investment?
Some content management systems have capabilities to track paid campaigns and link them to customer profiles as well as provide an overview of performance. It may also be possible, by using contextual data, to target a segment of your audience in real time, thus optimising your ad spend.
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