Tackling Challenges: How to Use Social Media for Businesses

Okay, okay, first things first we aren’t talking about the Ice Bucket Challenge and the like —though those are awesome. No, we’re talking about the difficulties of bringing your business to life online — specifically using social media. A huge part of that is building a living, breathing social media presence. You probably already have a Facebook page for yourself, but operating one for your business brings a whole host of hurdles you might not expect! To help businesses everywhere, I sat down with our Social Media Strategist Vianka to give you the straight dope on social media challenges for businesses!There are two components to a successful social campaign and presence: Ads and Organic. Ads are paid content you create and fund to get placed on other people’s feeds. Organic refers to the posts on your own page that will go out to your followers/people who have liked your page in the past.

How to Use Social Media for Businesses: Ads Challenges

Ads Approval

This has to be one of the most difficult things with social ads on any platform. It gets extremely difficult when the social platform states specific ad policies but are not very specific in detail about what is and is not approved. For the most part, they are not very transparent. To overcome that, you need to put in the work to make variation after variation, test campaign variables and constantly learn whatever you can about the policies in place.  At Helix, our ads team research and try to find alternative ways to advertise using social media, even if we have to use another social media platform.

Maintaining A Steady CPA:

A CPA (cost per acquisition) varies from business to business. Sometimes it is a very reasonable CPA, and sometimes it is not. And the CPA rarely stays stagnant; they increase or decrease because of a variety of factors. This depends on the time of day, week, season, trends, and specifically the algorithm in the social platform. You need to know what an acceptable CPA for your business is and how to work toward that. Obviously lower is better, but it is rarely perfect right out the gate!

Optimizations:

In order to meet (and exceed!) your expectations, it is very important to be making ongoing optimizations in all social campaigns. This is a challenge when the campaigns are doing great, and a small optimization is made to make it even better. The small optimization can change the flow the campaign is maintaining, and can sometimes create less engagement, sales, etc. It can be just as important to recognize where optimizations are possible and when the performance is nearing its peak. Sometimes the only thing needed to take a campaign to the next level is to increase the budget.

Budget Spending:

Within the optimizations, there is the goal of trying to hit the budget cap each month. At times, depending on the time of day, week, season, trends, and specifically the algorithm in the social platform, a social campaign can under spend its budget. You want to catch this before the end of the month to make sure you’re maximizing your campaign’s performance month to month. Setting and forgetting is not the way. Check-in, check performance, make budget adjustments and ensure you’re putting all of your marketing dollars to work.

Organic Challenges

Repetitive Content:

There will be a point in time where you run out of ideas, repeating the same calendar as last year. To overcome this, the social team must continue to research new ideas, see what your competitors are doing and measure their engagement against your own. Besides, social media is constantly changing and what works won’t be the same year to year or even month to month!

Engagement With Certain Industries:

This can definitely be a challenge if your industry is not as visually pleasing as others. To overcome this, research must be made and creative sessions must happen to think about how you can deliver something -different- to your audience. Think outside the box.

Attracting All Audiences/Dealing With Spam, Trolls:

In social media, you will learn that you will never please EVERYONE, all the time. Your posts may receive negative and/or spam comments. Social media is social, the internet brings us all together for better or sometimes worse. People may engage in a not so pleasant way. It is best to sometimes ignore, delete, or respond professionally if necessary. With these challenges identified ahead of time, you won’t be thrown for a loop the first time you come up against under spending budgets or angry comments. You can take care of them quickly — don’t get it twisted, they’ll still give you trouble in their own way — each complication is unique but having an idea ahead of time should help you better identify them when they crop up. Running social media accounts to engage and generate traffic is a skill, it’s why we have strategists for our clients — hopping in without any experience can take a long time to build those skills. Or, you could hire a new media agency with the experience and tools to deliver right out the gate! If you are looking to bring your business to life online, give us a call at Helix House! We are ready to help you get to where you want to be!