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Just over a year ago Beatrice Whelan left her own business “Website Extraordinaire” to take on the role of Social Media & Content Specialist at Sage Ireland. She tells Tweak Your Biz TV what she has learnt in that year and how small businesses and B2B’s can monitor and measure their social media strategy.

Beatrice Whelan

When Beatrice Whelan took on the role as Social Media & Content Specialist with Sage Ireland just over a year ago her biggest challenge was how to do B2B and accounts software in an interesting way on Facebook and other social media channels. I talked to Beatrice about the challenges she has faced, what works for her, the monitoring tools she is using and what her goals have been.

Here’s some of her key points:

• Be where your customer is. Sage is on Facebook because small business owners have pages on Facebook, if the customer is there they should be too.

• Sage Ireland’s strategy has been to give their Facebook followers genuinely useful content that they can use in their businesses.

• On Facebook they used live chats to engage with business owners. They invited business owners to ask questions on a particular subject such as business planning and social media  to experts in the field.

• They use Sysomos to monitor social media mentions and return on investment. They chose it as it’s good value for money and does everything they needed it to do.  It alerts the team whenever Sage or it’s products are mentioned online allowing them to respond when necessary. Also allows them to measure share of voice.

• Smaller businesses can utilize tools such as Google Alerts, Twilert and Sprout Social to monitor their online mentions.

• It’s easy to measure ROI if at the beginning you set goals and decide what they want to achieve. Sage is very web focused with it’s social media so they use Google Analytics to measure web traffic to landing pages and resulting sales.  They use their social media monitoring to measure share of voice.

• Beatrice’s top tip: Before thinking about what your social media strategy is think about what your content strategy is. How will you, as a business, add value to your customers?  By sharing genuinely useful content with them. If you were them what would you like to see shared on Facebook and Twitter?

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