3 Social Media Challenges For Marketers and How to Solve Them

According to the 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report (download the report by clicking here), 92% of marketers agree that social media is an important element of their business. However, 50% of those surveyed say that social media activities had not helped them improve sales.

Social media has proven to be an indispensible tool for building customer relations, customer management, brand awareness and management, and business promotion. Even then, marketers have a hard time justifying their social media budgets especially when it comes to revenue generation goals.

Here are some social media challenges faced by marketers and possible solutions to overcoming them:

Engaging with users in real time

Finding time to engage in social media activities is already a struggle for many solo-marketers.

But, what’s more challenging is being able to attend to fans and followers in real time, gathering real time data and trends and applying these to your social engagements.

In this context, ‘real-time’ engagement means responding to fans’ needs within one or two minutes.

Why is real time engagement so important?

Instantaneous contact is a measure of reliability, professionalism and good customer service.

To be able to instantaneously respond to consumer behavior and needs, it is important to establish a dedicated social media role. This could either be an in-house community manager or an agency that has a staff with channel-specific expertise.

Creating and marketing content that aligns with the brand identity

Success in social media requires a dynamic content distribution channel. At the same time, you need to understand the attributes and personas of your social media audience to be able to create relevant and engaging content.

Small business/internet marketers do not always have the resources to research their target audience, regularly create content and distribute it across all their social platforms.

One way to maintain a consistent distribution channel is developing an editorial calendar to organize content themes and manage content production.

It might be necessary to outsource some of your content creation needs, especially for content that requires technical expertise, for example, infographics, videos, or ebooks. Guest posts from experts can also help to support your content creation efforts.

Curation tools such as Curata, Curation Suite, Storify and others are excellent for aggregating interesting content and distributing it via your social platforms.

User-generated content is now popular as a method of engaging and interacting with consumers, content creation, social proof and brand awareness. Encouraging followers to create and distribute their own content is an impactful way to build loyalty and engagement, another pertinent challenge for marketers.

Increasing engagement among social media users

Let’s face it: The internet, and in particular, social media is saturated with content. It can be difficult for lesser known brands to generate engagement and visibility for their content.

How do you get more people to interact with your content on social media?

The truth is, it’s not enough to create compelling content. While this is utterly important, consistency will help you gain a reputation as a thought leader in your niche.

The challenge then lies in promoting your content across your social platforms and consistently channelling relevant, compelling content that your social followers and fans are interested in.

Interactive social media activities encourage your fans to become part of your brand’s experience. For example, Facebook contests, Twitter Chats and user-generated Vines are super-popular due to their ability to get fans to directly interact with your brand.

The type of content you distribute on social media will also impact engagement. Visual content works better on most social platforms. Leverage the power of pictures, videos, and infographics to draw users’ attention.

Measuring ROI from social media efforts

It is undeniable that social media has revolutionized how businesses engage with existing customers and acquire new ones.

However, even as marketers continue to grow their social budgets, the proverbial elephant in the room is whether all the efforts and the big budget will generate a substantial return on investment.

Some benefits such as web traffic, sales and the number of forms filled can be quantified, while others cannot.

A better approach to measuring social media returns is taking a less strict definition of ROI. When a user clicks through to your website from a link on social media, they may not make an immediate purchase, or sign up to your paid app.

However, your social campaign has succeeded in increasing awareness for your brand, which could be a stepping stone for the user to finally make a purchasing decision and chose your product at a later date.

Additionally, when users come to your site, it offers an opportunity for retargeting, remarketing and lead nurturing to convert them to actual customers.

Social Media Challenges

Like most forms of inbound marketing, social is constantly changing. As such, marketers need to adopt new techniques for getting the most mileage from social media to remain relevant to an elusive consumer base.