At Parthenon Publishing, we’re a pretty modest bunch.

We think we’re funny, but not all that funny.
We think we can blog, but if you follow Avinash Kaushik’s instead, hey, we get it.
We don’t need much fanfare. We do great work, and then we keep on moving.

But, sometimes you have to stop and give yourself a pat on the back. Indulge us, will you?

Frustrated by their previous social media provider, a client engaged Parthenon to manage their Facebook, Twitter and Google+ presence. This included conceptualizing, writing and posting all content. We were also tasked with general management, like responding to comments, audience building and retweeting.

We helped our client conceive a set of simple goals for their social media presence. (Incidentally, this is a step that we believe is all too often skipped in favor of posting immediately rather than posting with a purpose.)

Here are the goals we helped them create, as well as an explanation of what we’ve accomplished toward those goals two months since we began.

Increase Engagement on Social Channels
Social media is a conversation, not a monologue. The idea is to inspire engagement from your community.
Since taking the reins, Likes of our client’s posts are up 287%. Comments on our client’s posts are up 237%. Shares are up 171%. Well, you get the idea. In a short amount of time, their page is generating engagement well above their competitors in the market. Why are the metrics up? By bringing consistency, personality and a plan to these pages, Parthenon effectively engaged the community and inspired action.

Drive Traffic to the Website
Engagement is great, but we want to convert our Facebook followers into real paying customers, and you do that on your website. So our second core goal was to drive social users to conversion points on the website.
Monthly visitors from social sources are up over 600% from where they were prior to Parthenon’s involvement. More traffic to the website, particularly from social users who took the time to navigate away from social media toward a website, means more opportunities for conversions.

Best Practices
Lastly, our client really just wanted to have a best practices presence on Facebook. Parthenon has brought that in several forms:

• Custom images complete with headlines and a logo attached to every post
• A modern page presentation on Facebook and Twitter, including updated cover photos, ensuring important apps are featured, making business contact info easy to find, etc.. Targeted improvements can make a big impact on your social presentation.
• Daily posts at times we know the community to be most active.

We are constantly monitoring page analytics and social media updates to make sure we change with the times.

Every once in a while, it’s important to celebrate your success, and the above successes feel pretty good.

That said, every post needs a takeaway, and ours is this: Having a Facebook page for your business and posting on it when you can is no longer enough. Facebook has evolved. Facebook is evolving as we speak.

To use social media to effectively drive business, you need to set clear objectives, develop a plan to reach those objectives, and devote resources to execute that plan. You have to be out there, marketing your business in an interesting way. Anything less than that, and you may as well throw a billboard on the side of a country road and call it a day.