You spend time, energy, and money making sure your social media presence is known to your customers. As a business owner, you may not have time to look at every graph and chart provided by your social media manager. With social media still being a new marketing tactic for some businesses, how can you tell if your efforts are successful? What metrics should you be examining?
1. Traffic
You should have Google Analytics or another program installed to track all the visitors to your website. Examine your traffic from all social media platforms. Create a chart that identifies your top sources. Over time you’ll be able to see which have the most growth potential.
2. Visitor Retention
This is different from traffic reporting. Understanding the time people spend on your website when they are referred from social media is important. If you see that your visitors are leaving quickly, then you should consider updating the design and/or copy of your landing page. Also, look at the information you are providing. Are you just selling your products or giving useful information? Remember, interesting information goes a long way, and overselling a product turns fans away from your business.
3. Audience Reports
The purpose of social media is mostly to engage and interact with followers. Just remember you want those followers to grow in numbers. It’s always good to keep records of how many new followers or likes you are receiving weekly.
4. Engagement Reports
Interacting with your followers is a key component of social media. Record the number of active members vs. total members. If you find that you have a low percentage of active members, perhaps you need to start a campaign to reach out to those members who have not participated in any social media conversations lately.
5. Conversion Rate
It would be unrealistic to say you aren’t selling something on your social media site. Just like any other medium, you want to keep a good handle on what drove your consumer to make a purchase. Creating a unique code for your social media fans to use at checkout, or a coupon fans can print out and redeem in your brick and mortar store, is the most direct way to track sales.
6. Mentions
Are you giving people something to talk about? Be on the lookout for how often your brand gets mentioned. For Twitter you should create a #hashtag so you can look at what has been said about your business when you do a search.
7. Sharing Report
As a child we heard things like, “Sharing is Caring”. The sharing report has the same idea behind it. Look over how many shares your Facebook posts have created. How many friends of friends have shared your posts with their network? It’s important to know that your content is worth spreading.
8. Blogger Breakdown
You share your ideas and tips with the world via Blogger or WordPress, but are your readers connecting with your information? Remember to make sure that you turn on the “Allow Comments” section on these blogging sites. Encourage opinions from your readers. Always add in social media buttons like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Make it easy for your follower to spread your word by the click of a button.
