Check out this interview with Kara Burney, Director of Content at Track Maven, on how you can leverage Social Media to grow your ecommerce business.
What is the biggest change/challenge you foresee in the near future of social media marketing?
The near future of social media marketing is all about creating immersive user experiences.
Businesses have gotten really good at distributing content on social media. But most are still not very good at creating content worth distributing in the first place. As the bar is raised for immersive content, broadcasting the same static content across each and every social channel won’t cut it anymore. Businesses have to figure out how to plan and invest in a channel-specific social media strategy.
What channels should entrepreneurs keep their eyes on and why?
Right now, Instagram is the channel to jump on.
At TrackMaven, we analyzed 51 million pieces of social media content from 40,000 brands on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. We found that the engagement ratio for businesses is 10 times higher on Instagram than on Facebook (and dramatically higher than LinkedIn or Twitter).
But Instagram won’t stay that way for long; the engagement rate for brands on Instagram is already starting to come down to earth as the network monetizes. Now’s the time to build your Instagram brand quickly and cheaply.
What’s your #1 piece of advice for entrepreneurs who are starting their social media strategy from scratch?
To paraphrase Picasso: Good marketers copy; great marketers steal. The easiest way to scale a social strategy from scratch is to learn from the big players in your industry.
Conduct a competitive audit of the brands you compete with directly, the big players you aspire to disrupt, and major industry influencers. That will give you an understanding of the right channels to prioritize and relevant content topics. Then exploit the white space for brand differentiation and thought leadership.
What social network do you spend the most time on and what social media marketing tool could you not live without?
Twitter plays a major “second screen” role in my life — both professionally and personally. This year’s live stream of the 2016 Wimbledon tournament on Twitter forever changed my tennis and Twitter fandom.
Our marketing team couldn’t live without our own product, TrackMaven, which we use to track the impact of our marketing and keep tabs on competitors, or Sprout Social, which we use to distribute all of our social media content.
Check out the original article, with excerpts from other insightful interviews here.
