Monitoring your social media marketing

One of the things I get asked most about is how to measure and monitor social media marketing - does it give an ROI?

With conventional marketing it is impossible to know exactly how many people have seen your advert, listened to your radio ad or viewed the A-board outside your practice. It's also almost impossible to know what is the best day of the week, or the best time of day to have that advert delivered to them.

The great thing with social media is that all of this is measurable, this means that you can post seemingly 'non-marketing' messages, gauge the best time of day, the best day of the week and the best type of message to see when you get the best response. Using this data you then know exactly when to post the 'harder-hitting' marketing messages for maximum return.

This software allows you to monitor these metrics to ensure you place the correct message at the correct time.

I've made a video of exactly what the software can measure, it also gives a brief introduction to show how easy it is to post to Facebook and Twitter and then to monitor those responses. Please take a few moments to watch the video through, it may be best to maximise it to full screen so you can see the detail of what goes on.




Watch on YouTube now.

New Ways to Measure Your Social Media

If you are already a user of Social Media Borg then you need to read on to find out about an exciting new addition in the reporting section of the software, if you're not currently a user then the following will help you understand more about measuring the effectiveness of your social media messages.

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:

1. Post the same content at different times of the day.
2. Post different content at the same time of day.
3. Split the content between various social media sources.
4. 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.

Houston, we have a problem

You may have noticed that over the past few days there have been a few glitches with the Borg Software, specifically multiple posting of old blog posts to Facebook and Twitter.

Many companies would try to hide this fact, but my business philosophy has always been to be open and honest with people, and so I decided to blog this update.

As soon as I became aware of the issues (about 0900 this morning) I contacted the developers. As ever their response was immediate, which is why I think they are so great.

Here's what they say:

We have been in the process of migrating from Rackspace to a brand new infrastructure over at Amazon AWS, which should result in improved performance. We began this process last week and completed the migration yesterday. A few bugs crept into some of our back-end processes during this migration which we have ironed out today.
Apologies for any inconvenience caused by this, but all should be coming back to normal now.

So on behalf of the development team and myself, I'd like to sincerely apologise for any problems that this migration has caused. From now on you should find the software more responsive and I'm looking forward to a new round of upgrades that should now be possible.

As soon as they're ready I'll let you know.

Keeping borging...

Mark

Updating Your Facebook Timeline Cover Photo

A recently added feature on Social Media Borg social media management dashboard is the ability to update the cover photo of your Facebook page from within the management console. In this post, we’ll take you step by step through the process of setting up and then updating the page’s cover photo.

This is a really useful function if you are running specific marketing to your Facebook page, either via emai, Pay Per Click advertising or a 'like' campaign from the practice, as it allows you to schedule cover photo updates for specific days in the campaign - you might want a:

1. Campaign Ready Photo
2. Campaign underway photo
3. Campaign almost finished photo
4. Campaign done and dusted photo 

 To get started, log in to the Social Media Borg Software

 Step 1: Add your Facebook Cover Photo service
a) Open the Add/Edit Services tab, and from within the Add Service pane, open the Photos tab.
b) Next, choose Facebook Cover Photo by clicking Add. If you’re not already logged into Facebook, you’ll be given the opportunity to.
c) Now, choose the Facebook Page you want to use from the list of those you administer and click Save Settings.
d) Click OK when the pop up shows.
e) You should now see the new service in My Services.

 Step 2: Update your Cover Photo
a) With the service now configured, simply go to Message Box to compose a new message. Choose the Facebook Cover Photo from the list of message types.
b) Click Photo or File.
c) Choose the image for your cover photo.
 d) Click Subject or Title and enter a name for your photo.
 e) Finally, Hit Send.

Step 3. Check your Facebook page (optional) a) Your Facebook Cover Photo should now be updated!

Facebook Statistics

I have to confess to being bit of a statistics freak, I'm in love with Google analytics and equally in love with Facebook's Insights.

Interestingly we can see Facebook Insights for apps as well as pages and I thought I'd share with you the statistics for the Social Media Borg App over this past month. This is the fastest growing dedicated dental platform for managing your social media online and it's great to have you on board.

These statistics paint an interesting picture of Facebook, you can see that from relatively few stories posted we got a massive amount of views - demonstrating nicely the amplification ability of Facebook.

697 stories published  >>>   428 X   >>>   298,551 Story Impressions

So, with 25 Social Media Borg users, we generated 697 stories (an average of 1 post per user per day), these were then amplified by a multiple of 428 to then be viewed 298,551 times - WOW.

This shows that each story you post will typically get 428 views if posted via the software, pretty amazing stats don't you think?

So, my suggestion is to keep posting your useful and fun content to Facebook, and if you're not doing so, ask yourself why not!

USEFUL TIPS:
For some useful tips on posting with Social Media Borg, why not sign up to the next FREE webinar on Thursday 1st March at 1pm, sign up FREE here.

"How to find local people on Twitter, then follow automatically while you sleep!

Twitter is a very powerful marketing tool, it's reported that people are 67% more likely to recommend your services if they are connected to you on Twitter - and we all know that Word of Mouth marketing like this is a great way to ensure happy patient referrals on Twitter.

So, now there are 2 questions that need answering:

1. How do you find local people on Twitter?
2. How do you engage with them?

And of course, how do you do that without taking up valuable surgery time?

Well, the answer lies in my very clever software, Social Media Borg, this allows you to:

ENGAGE	MONITOR	GROW	MEASURE

And do it all AUTOMATICALLY while you sleep!

To find out more please join me for a FREE 30 minute 'Lunch and Learn' Webinar where I will show you how this is done.

This webinar is suitable for:

1. Current users of the software, this will help you understand the software further and discover new ways to use it
2. Practice managers or others responsible for using the software or marketing
3. Practices just starting out in online marketing looking for a solution to wasted time
4. Practices already using other software and looking for more cost effective and advanced solutions

To access the webinar all you need is a computer with speakers and an internet connection - a microphone is also useful.

Date: Thursday 1st March 2012

Time: 1pm

Location: In front of a computer anywhere you like!

To register, please enter your details here. Places are limited to 15 so please book soon.

How to schedule a Facebook group question - and why you must!

Facebook groups are a great way to generate engagement on your Facebook page, plus a brilliant way to allow patients to feedback their concerns to you and allow you to generate useful data.

One example is a question I ran on a client's page which asked:

"When you come to the dentist, what is your greatest concern?"

We gave a selection of answers, pain, money, health etc and the number 1 concern? Worry that you will find something wrong that they didn't know about.

What great information for you.

There are 3 simple steps to set up your question:

1. Type your question in the subject line
2. Add your suggestions to the compose section, 1 question per line
3. Choose a time to send, either immediately or scheduled for a future date (Tip, the optimum time is 6pm on a Saturday)

Using Social Media Borg is a simple way to set up and schedule questions, along with scheduling other messages you can plan your social media campaign in advance at a time to suit you.

For a regular account the software is an affordable £19.99 per month, a no brainer for any practice serious about marketing online.