Using Marketing Data to Build up Your Social Presence

As a social-savvy executive, you know the value of a strong social media presence. You probably even have an online profile (or five) of your own. Your customers know to visit your business and personal profiles for up-to-the-minute news on what you’ve got in the works and how you’re working to meet their needs. But without the support of your marketing team, you may not be maximizing your impact.

Just like traditional marketing campaigns, your social presence shouldn’t stop at generating views or shares. You also want to drive sales. To help discover how a tweet or a status update can help your bottom line, we sat down with Mike Dudgeon from LinkedIn’s enterprise tech team.

“For me it's always a balance. I think there is a quantitative value… ‘what's my viewership?’ But at the same time you want to be doing some type of qualitative study as well… is this message resonating with them? And at the end of the day, is it resulting in some sort of revenue generation.”

So how do you curate an organic social media presence that resonates with your current marketing strategy and still feels authentic? You start with your customer data. Your marketing team should know how your audience likes to engage and through which social channels.

When your next big campaign comes around, marketing can coordinate with you and your other social influencers by suggesting keywords and topics which might play especially well on a specific site. The idea is not to alter who you or your employees are online, but to slightly adjust your course when you want to generate specific interest or deepen the discussion surrounding a product.

As customers begin to engage in the discussion, your marketing team can start reaching out with value-adding information, qualifying leads for sales as they do so. For more on making the most of your social presence, check out the rest of our interview with LinkedIn’s Mike Dudgeon.