If you are using social media to market your business, you need to measure it. However, it is important not to measure it just to have a pretty graph and have metrics for the sake of it. You should be measuring your social media activities so that you know what is working, what is not working, and how you can improve. Tracking performance is at the crux of your social media strategy.
In this post, we are going to look at how you can tell whether your social media strategy is working.
Look at your conversions
First of all, you can calculate conversions or set goals on your Google Analytics dashboard. This allows you to establish how many of your social media users are taking meaningful actions on your website after visiting your social media. How you define this action is up to you, but what is important is that you know exactly what percentage of your social media traffic is doing it, and the value that this generates for your business.
Look at your engagements
We have a tendency to put a priority on how many followers we have, whereas engagement is what we should really be looking at. When we talk about engagement, we are talking about likes, shares, and comments. This shows that your social media followers are not just passively seeing posts, but they are actively interested in what you are posting. For Instagram, for example, an engagement rate of 6% is considered pretty good.
What is your growth velocity?
The aim of all businesses is to grow year on year, so to see if your social media strategy is working, look back on the data that you hold from the previous years and make sure it is going in the right direction? If they are staying stagnant, or even worse, declining, you need to consider where you are going wrong.
Look at the on-site behavior of your visitors
Take a look at the social-specific traffic in Google Analytics. What is this traffic doing on your website? What pages are they visiting, and how engaged and interested are they in your website content? If they appear to bounce off after a page or two – check your bounce rate on Google Analytics – you may be targeting the wrong demographic and audience.
Social media marketing performance cannot be defined by one particular variable or other metrics, nor is it the same for any business. If you want to know whether your social media strategy is successful, you first need to identify what success means for you and your business and then use a set of different metrics to determine whether it works or not. For some, success can be traffic, for others, it can be revenue created or an increase in visibility. It can be complicated, but knowing what you define as successful and working out whether your social media strategy is working is essential if you want to understand your ROI and make improvements to improve your effectiveness.
But what do you do if it isn’t working?
If after looking at your metrics, you realize that something isn’t quite working, you need to do something about it. Here are a few key things to look at:
Check you are hitting the right place for the right people
Social media is huge. On top of the most obvious networks – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube – there are countless other ones you may not have thought of – Snapchat, TikTok, and Reddit being some. There are also countless websites and forums where users interact and engage with one another. Even for a large business with a dedicated social media team initiating all of these channels can be an enormous task.
Instead, concentrate on those social networks that produce a better opportunity to communicate with your intended audience. And with that in mind, you need to consider exactly who your audience is. The particular nature of your business and industry will have a huge influence on where you will find your audience. Retailers selling high-quality, visually beautiful products should certainly look to Instagram and Pinterest for their image-sharing platforms. If word-of-mouth is important to your company (and most, if not all), Twitter is probably right for you. If you need to reach a professional community, LinkedIn is likely to be the solution.
That doesn’t mean that you need to restrict yourself to a single social media network. But by knowing your audience and concentrating your efforts on the most relevant sites, you will be able to optimize your productivity and performance.
Maintain activity
Social media moves quickly – really quickly. As a result, you need to make sure that you do too. Your business needs to be posting regularly and consistently. Slow down too much on your business social media and you find yourself hemorrhaging followers and not attracting new ones. When it comes to a social media marketing strategy, full commitment is vital.
Humanize your brand
Humanizing your brand is a crucial step to ensure the effectiveness of your company’s social media marketing campaign, and you can do so only through involved, personal participation. It’s the secret to building a strong emotional connection with your audience, strengthening relationships with your clients, and creating a strong foundation of brand advocates.
If you don’t connect to your customers on a personal level – the chances are exponentially greater that they won’t connect to your brand.
Link it to your business goals
Finally, when it comes to using social media to market your business, you need to ensure you have a distinct connection to your business goals. You may well have tracked your social media activity, but you also need to ensure that you connect them to your actual business goals.
To this end, you need to take the time to really build a comprehensive, workable set of goals that you think social media marketing will help you achieve, and then invest in analytics and other resources that you need to recognize your success or failure. Based on these results, you can change your plans for the future, making your social marking strategies even better in the future.
