That dreaded question everyone in the Online Marketing industry, and many other industries get. How long will it take to get results?

Online Marketing Industry

The reason we say this is a dreaded question is because the best answer is basically, that results will vary.

This is due to a few factors

1. The definition of success or results in social media is different for everyone.
2. Different platforms have different growth rates.
3. Different industries present different opportunities.

What can you do as a business to accelerate reaching your social media goals based on these factors?

The first thing you can do is to set goals or expectations with your Social Media Marketing firm when starting, and provide feedback. If this is not done, your account representative(s) may set out on a strategic path that you do not want them to take, even though it may be successful by their definition. The second part might be even more important than the first.

Let’s say that the goal when starting is to increase interaction. After the first month, engagement went up by over 700%. During the next month it’s up 86% on top of that 700%. And after that, it’s up another 22%, and so on. Sounds pretty good from the marketer’s perspective until they hear from the client that they want a different type of content going up. Now, 3 to 4 months into what appears to be a strategy that met the goal, everything gets re-worked. This is obviously frustrating for both sides, and if feedback had been given along the way, a different and better fitting strategy could have been implemented.

Growth rate is important to understand simply because it helps set those expectations and goals we spoke of before. From what we’ve seen lately, Instagram has the fastest growth rate with respect to both followers and engagement.

Proper social media tags

Even with single digit followers we’ve seen posts get double and even triple digit likes with the use of proper tags. With the ability to run ads for almost any reason on Facebook, with the proper budget, rapid growth is very much possible here as well. This is not to say this can’t be done organically, but it is becoming increasingly difficult. Google Plus is a whole other animal. This is an extreme case but, it is possible to have 0 profile followers and still get over 100,000 views a month thanks to Collections and Communities.

Beyond that, there are a different number of Communities for brands within the same industry. For example, there are at least 22 different VW Communities with 500 or more members vs just 5 for Volvo. We of course work on more than just those 3 platforms, but they are the most common for our clients.

As we’ve said before, for a Social Media strategy to be successful the business has to be on the right platform(s). Instagram is clearly better for a photographer than an author. A food truck would be better off on Twitter than a finance company. If you have a physical location, you should have at least a Facebook and Google Plus. If energy gets focused on a platform that is not right for your business, this will slow down growth in areas that are tailor made for your industry.

Yes, Social Media success, no matter how you define it, can happen in a flash, but for the most part it takes time. With proper feedback, on the right platforms, and understanding how each one works, we can all meet our goals quicker.