Who are you and what does your company do?
My name is Courtney Spritzer, I am the cofounder and COO of SocialFly. SocialFly is a social media marketing and PR firm. We specialize is creating social media and PR strategies for businesses. We work with clients in Fashion, Beauty and Hospitality.
A short description of how and why you got started in social media.
I’ve always loved social media. When I was in college, Facebook was becoming very popular and was only available for college students. I found myself spending hours on the site. After I graduated, I worked as a financial analyst at American Express. While I was working there, American Express partnered with Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter to provide benefits for their card members. When I saw a company like American Express embrace social media, I knew there were many implications for all businesses. I started working with my co-founder Stephanie Abrams on the side of me full time job, to help other businesses leverage social media to their advantage. Eventually, we quit our jobs to focus on building Socialfly.
What do you believe are the benefits of using social media for business.
There are a lot of benefits for using social media for business, they include: raising brand awareness in a more cost effective way than traditional media, building relationships with customers, and driving traffic to your website. You can track people’s behaviour when they view your content and collect their email addresses. Social media also helps improve customer service, there are so many benefits.
What do you think are common mistakes business owners make when building awareness on social media?
I don’t think business owners realize how powerful Facebook is for advertising. If you want your content to be seen on Facebook, it’s worth investing some money to promote your post. It’s very beneficial because you can reach your exact customer by paying Facebook to advertise to your target market. Facebook has a lot of data and you can target people by gender, zip code, interests, marital status, etc.
Another common mistake is that business owners are not posting the right type of content. It might come across too salesy or not visually appealing. Social media is very visual, if you don’t have the right visual assets for your business you might be deterring your customers.
What qualities do you think social media managers should have?
Social media managers are people who know how to figure things out with little direction because social media is always changing. They need to be creative thinkers who can write and come up with campaigns to execute. Someone who has a sense of aesthetic and knows the right types of images to post.
How do business owners know if they social media campaign is working?
You can find out whether your campaign is working or not right away from the analytics on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. You can also look at Google analytics to see whether traffic is being driven to your website.
One thing I recommend, before starting any campaign, is to define specific goals. For example if your goal is to collect e-mail addresses, then build a whole campaign around that and track the number of e-mail addresses received to determine whether you were successful. If you want to drive more traffic to your website, you should test different types of images, content or ads to see what drives the most traffic. If your goal is engagement then you need to figure out what type of content receives the most interaction.
There is a lot of available information you can track to find out if you’re moving in the right direction like clicks to the website, engagement, follower growth, increase in sales, etc.
How do you see social media evolving over the next 5 years and what do you hope to see?
Social media has evolved tremendously in the last 5 years. Now Instagram, Snapshat and Pinterest are very popular and there are small platforms emerging all the time that are worth investing in, like Periscope or Meerkat.
Video content is very important now as well and brands should consider creating this type of content.
If you can share one best practice when using social media what would it be?
You have to be diligent and consistent when using social media. You need an all or nothing approach- either all in or all out. You need a strategy and you need an execution plan. Social media is very time consuming so assigning the role to a specific person or agency is key to get results.
