Competition in the social media space is increasing. Paid social media is getting more expensive, and organic posts must work harder to achieve the same level of engagement and impact. And that means that social media teams need to work even harder to get results.

Social media plays a significant role in marketing and customer service, because social media makes it easy to have conversations with the people who matter to your organisation. 

Yet the big challenges haven’t changed: when to post, what to post and how to show a return on investment (ROI). Those are the answers that social media teams need more than ever in 2022. 

When to post and what to post on social media

Social media teams consistently report that knowing how to get their greatest engagement and ROI are their main challenges.

Knowing what to post and when to post are decisions best made with data. Data about what worked last time informs what should happen next time. 

Here are our top tips for using past data to plan future posts.

1. Niche marketing needs niche data

In a world where highly targeted marketing is the key to success, you need granular data, that you can slice and dice to answer your audience’s most specific questions. 

Segmentation is only possible with data that gives you the full picture about your audience. Who they are, what they like and don’t like and when they’re active on the channels you’re posting on. 

How Brolly Insights can help: With a data set that includes every single record in your connected social media accounts, Brolly Insights gives you at-a-glance access to engagement levels, sentiment, audience activity and popular hashtags.

2. A/B testing with a rocket

A/B testing is a great way of measuring the effectiveness of your social media posts. Not only for paid social, A/B testing is also an effective way to improve the impact of your organic posts. Reliable, detailed data is essential for successful testing. Send the same post out with different images or copy (one change at a time) and see how sentiment and engagement shift, then use that feedback to design your next campaign.

How Brolly Insights can help: View sentiment, comment count and lifespan of your posts in Brolly’s Insights dashboards, drilling down from consolidated cross-channel data to channel by channel. Zero in on one post or filter by account, channel or date range and then feed that information back into your next campaign, refining your content so it really hits the mark.

3. Long term data, not just 30 days

Successful social media is data-driven. As you do your weekly scheduling, your social media publishing tool may give recommendations for when and what to post. Generally, the automated recommendations from your publishing tool will be informed by the last 30 days of data. That’s great, but what if you want to look at something from a year ago, such as a seasonal campaign or a recurring annual event. How did last year’s posts about your annual festival perform? How could you improve them this year? Last time you told your customers about a new infrastructure project, was the response positive or negative? Did some posts have a more positive response than others? The last launch of your new policy saw a 78% positive response. How can you get it to 88% positive?

How Brolly Insights can help: Brolly Insights data draws on your entire social media history, or you can filter to a date range that meets your reporting needs, or focus on just one channel or entity. If you’re using Groups in Brolly, you can break the data down to just see that Group’s posts either across all their channels or for a subset. Identify the records that you want to analyse, check Insights for the data you need and get to work making this year’s posts even more impactful.

Measuring return on your investment

Social media requires an investment of time, budget and effort. Organisations want to see a return on that investment.  The Hootsuite team says in its Social Trends 2022 report the impact of social media on marketing activities is capturing the attention of business leaders, who can see the value in broadening the scope for social media, across their organisations using Brolly’s powerful segmentation tools. 

Brolly Insights Plus extends your social media archive 

Our customers love the Brolly feed for the way it gives them access to a birds-eye view of their data, the ability to zero into an individual post or comment with just a few clicks, then zoom back out again for context. And they love our basic Insights for the channel overview graph, the at-a-glance channel performance and the downloadable reports. 

Insights Plus is a turbo charge, giving you access to dashboards that let you see how your social media is tracking for activity, sentiment, engagement and topics.  No matter how you’re using your archives now, Insights Plus will take it to the next level.