One of the problems with conventional marketing is that it is difficult to know if the people you want to reach are engaging with your message, typically it's almost impossible to tell how many people have listened to your radio advert, read your marketing flyer or seen your advert at the local train station.
This is one area where social media marketing and online marketing completely dominate, it's the ability to robustly tell how many people have seen each message, we can then split test messages to see which get the best response, or example one could:
- Post the same content at different times of the day.
- Post different content at the same time of day.
- Split the content between various social media sources.
- Experiment with images, links and simple messages.
By mixing up the marketing message you can start get an idea of what makes people do things, on which social media platform and at what time of the day.
This split testing means that when you wish to post an important message, perhaps with an explicit call to action to sign up to an e-mail marketing list, take advantage of a special offer or visit your practice then you know exactly when to post that message to get maximum results.
But how can you go about doing this?
This is where the recent advancements in Social Media Borg reporting system have really come into their own. To access the new reports simply click on 'My Reports' on the main home screen.
What then happens is you are presented with an array of reports taken as an average from all of the accounts you are running (bearing in mind with the software you can run multiple Facebook, Twitter and other accounts).
let's take a look at some of the reports which are now generated.
Top links
If you are posting links to resources to help your patients, or perhaps back to your website it would be good to know which ones are generating the most number of clicks. The first report (shown top left in the following image) will show you the number of clicks that you have had from each of the links posted.
Every link which is posted from the software is automatically tracked and so you can tell how many people have clicked, even if it has been re-tweeted and passed on many times.
Best time to post
The main dashboard shows the best time to post taken as an average over all of your media accounts, as you can see the best time to meet post is 10 PM. You also need to bear in mind that this is 10 PM local time in the UK, which if we are interacting with people in the USA is often mid-afternoon.
One can also drill down deeper into this an undercover the best time to post for any of your Twitter or Facebook accounts, this is particularly useful to know exactly what percentage chance you have of engagement when you post at a specific time of the day.
Scorecard
This gives an overall view of the interactions, total audience, influence and number of clicks in the given period. You will also be presented with a percentage indicator of whether this is higher or lower than the previous period.
Once again you can use various social media techniques of posting types of messages in one month, then switch this to a different technique the following month to see which one got the most interactions.
Best time to share links
Many practices use social media as a way of driving traffic to their website, and in my opinion this is a great use of social media. But wouldn't it be a good thing to know the best time of day to post these links in order to get the most number of clicks? Using the software we can analyse this and see exactly when the best time of day is.
By using software such as Social Media Borg you can begin to get some accurate data from your online marketing so that you know exactly when and where you should be posting.
The software is available as a stand-alone social media management tool with accounts from as low as £9.99 +vat per month or as a fully setup and working system with a series of automatic messages unique and specific to your own dental practice for £50+vat per month.
