Response to Erica's Question

          Good question Erica. I can’t believe we are almost through with this class either. I think the “best practices” of high social media performance are outlined on page 149 of Mark W. Schaefer’s Return on Influence. In this section of his book, Schaefer lists and describes influence marketing’s best practices. When determining the “best practices” of high social media performance, first one must interpret whether they have a conversational brand. There would not be much point in creating a social media strategy if one’s brand is not actively discussed on social media. The second point is to “have a strategy.” I think this is the most important theme in this list because social media marketing will provide a very low return on investment if the strategy is not in line with the organization’s goals. Once it has been determined that the organization has a conversational brand and a specific and measurable strategy in harmony with the organizational goals, it is time to unleash the social media marketing plan.  This entails reaching out to relevant and powerful influencers in order to create meaningful and authentic conversations.  It is important to choose relevant influencers because “you have to ensure that the product is pertinent to each individual and her audience (Schaefer, 2012).” It is also important that the influencers are trusted and honest because customers can sense when someone is not being authentic and simply trying to sell them a product. Transparency is also important for legality because bloggers have to reveal when they are receiving compensation of any kind. Finally, it is important to make the promotion shareable. The whole point of the social media strategy is to generate conversation and get as many interested people involved in the product or service being sold (Schaefer, 2012).”

            Once the social media strategy has been implemented it is time to track its performance. I think the best way to measure performance is to analyze people’s responses on social media. This analysis should determine the scope and reach of the social media strategy.  Is the content of your message being shared with others and are they reacting positively? If people are receiving the message, sharing it and reacting positively to its content, then it seems like the social media strategy is performing at a high level. A few people could analyze social content for a small business, but large businesses may turn to an outside source like Klout to analyze its social media performance. Klout would be good company for large corporations (not that it isn’t useful for small companies) because its algorithms can analyze large quantities of social media content across multiple platforms. Finally, an increase in sales would be a strong indicator of high social media performance. After all, the goal of social media marketing is to reach as many customers as possible, get them interested in the product and eventually have them make a purchase.

I will discuss other options for high social media performance and go into further detail about tracking its performance in my subsequent posts.  I also plan to apply it to our digital paper, but I don’t think I can tackle all this information in one blog post. Thanks for reading.

Schaefer, Mark W. (2012) Return on Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social

Scoring, and Influence Marketing. San Francisco, CA. McGraw Hill