If you don’t measure the effectiveness of social media marketing in your company, your business will lose money. Even if it seems to be an indirect loss, it is there. And the numbers can even grow over time.
But how?, we hear you asking. Well, if your social media marketing team doesn’t know how to measure the results of their actions, three things can happen:
- they’ll act blindly, not knowing what’s working and what’s not
- they’ll stick with things that don’t work
- they won’t know which part of your social media strategy they should focus on
Each of these translates to you making less money than you could if you concentrated your efforts on the right things.
So, if you don’t know how to measure social media success, stick with us. This article will be perfect for you.
Effectiveness of social media lies in the right KPIs
In his video “6 Steps to Market Any Business”, Neil Patel points out that copying someone’s social media strategy for business won’t necessarily make yours successful. This is true. Your business is unique to some extent and this is exactly why you can’t just copy-paste someone else’s approach.
If you come across a list of social media KPIs – key performance indicators – you won’t just start measuring each of them. The more you know about your business, the more aware you are of which KPIs define your marketing success.
But, still – we can’t go without giving you a list of the KPIs you should consider tracking:
Followers
The number of your followers speaks directly for your online credibility. However, remember that quality always beats quantity. It’s better to have a smaller but engaged group of fans instead of gathering people who don’t care about your brand at all.
Impressions
The number of people who’s seen your content – related to as impressions – can be a clear indicator of your content’s reach. That, in turn, tells you a lot about how different platform algorithms perceive what you publish.
Likes
Likes reflect whether people respond positively to your content. Remember however that likes hardly translate to bigger revenue. In fact, they are becoming less and less popular and Instagram is even testing a complete like removal.
Shares
Shares are a standard type of KPI that you’d like to keep your eye on. With the right software, you can measure the effectiveness of social media share-wise.
In GetSocial, for example, you can get an alert when your content goes viral as a result of many people sharing it. But remember – not every share happens publicly. A lot of sharing takes place in private channels, such as emails and messengers. It’s called dark social and you can learn more about it from our whitepaper.
And in case you’re wondering – yes, GetSocial does track all dark social shares.
Link Clicks
In GetSocial, we call them Referrals. Whenever someone clicks the link in your social media message, you’ll see that in your GetSocial analytics.
Low click-through rates can mean that your messages need some improvement or optimization.
Comments
Effectiveness of social media doesn’t boil down to selling or promoting your product or service. It’s also about creating a sense of community around your brand.
Look at Nike’s Facebook page. One glance at their posts can tell you about the massive engagement they get:
And there’s Domino’s – also having engagement results to be proud of:
Lastly, take a look at Amazon using Facebook comments to deliver customer support:
If your social channels are like a busy market square, you’ll have a higher chance of selling your product or service.
Conversions
A converted user isn’t necessarily the one who gave you their money. Conversions can be revenue-generating or not. The latter happens when a user signs up for your email list, for example.
You can easily track both kinds of conversions from your GetSocial account.
There you have it – these are the key performance indicators you might want to look at while measuring your social media effectiveness.
But we still need to clarify one more thing.
How can tracking social media effectiveness help your business?
An answer to this question is simple. Measuring the effectiveness of social media strategy in your company shows you where the money comes from. As a result, you can focus on nourishing these sources.
But there’s more to that.
#1 You’ll pick the right goal
Going back to what Neil Patel said, setting the right goal is crucial. If you don’t know what you’re after, you can’t pick the correct tools to make it happen. However, if you get the data about your social media success, then you know what you should work on to maximize your profit.
Pierre de Braux on Social Media Examiner points out four main goals of a social media strategy for business:
1.1. Lead Generation
This is what most businesses go for and hope for. You want to grab more traffic from your social media channels and convert it into paying customers. Whether you’ll work with paid ads or focus on useful content, you’ll need the knowledge coming from your social media analytics. Only with numbers at your disposal, you’ll know what gives you leads to follow up with.
1.2. Brand Awareness
Making people talk about your brand, see your brand and know your brand: that’s also a pretty standard goal. Hanging out where your audience hangs out is a normal and recommended strategy to grow your business. In the digital era, social media platforms are a place to be if you want to build your brand awareness.
1.3. Community Building
Humans, don’t like playing solo. We like to belong somewhere and be a part of something. We develop strong feelings about the communities we belong to. And that’s pretty straightforward – if people feel positively emotional about your brand, they’ll become your best advocates and your most effective marketers.
1.4. Learning more about your audience
Discovering what people like and what they don’t like, how you can improve your product or service so they enjoy it more, what problems keep them up at night. Knowing this is crucial for any business that wants to succeed.
While all these goals seem important, we do recommend that you – at least in the beginning – focus on one of them only. You can, of course, have a secondary goal to achieve. But don’t stretch yourself out too thin.
#2 Learn More About Your Audience
Yes, we are repeating ourselves a little. But that’s the point – metrics pulled from platforms such as GetSocial give you a huge insight into the effectiveness of social media.
You’re bound to discover things you didn’t know about your audience: what types of content they prefer? When do they consume it? What platform is their favourite? Do they need someone to talk to or a guide to follow? What converts them into paying customers most often? What triggers them to share your content with their loved ones?
And that’s just a tip of an iceberg.
All this information will help you create a very detailed Ideal Customer Profile. Your first ideas about your customer base were probably more of an educated guess than a data-based picture. But with social media metrics, this can change.
#3 You’ll stop wasting time
Imagine how much time you’ll save if you stop doing all the things that don’t make you any money.
If your traffic comes from Instagram and not Twitter, then you’ll focus on the former. If your customers prefer shiny infographics to lengthy videos, then you’ll save so much time if you don’t record any more clips.
Focus on what’s working and make sure it aligns with your goals.
#4 You’ll prevent shrinking of your customer base or even win back your lost customers
Yes, it’s possible. Winning back all the people you once lost can be a tough task but it’s your duty to prevent others from leaving as well.
And you do that by creating content that is fun, useful and engaging. Simply put: create content your customers want and need.
If you post too often, you may put people off. If your content isn’t answering their needs, they’ll stop following you. If you just repeat what’s already been said a thousand times, nobody will have a reason to click the Follow button on your profile.
You need something that will make people regret missing out on messages from your feed.
Over to you
Feeling convinced to track the effectiveness of social media yet?
We hope you are. After all, if you can choose between crafting useful content that converts traffic into paying customers, why would you choose to act blindly and miss out on all the opportunities?
Don’t make the same mistake that hundreds of businesses out there make every day. Start tracking your social metrics today!
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