By Jennifer McDougall
Social media is a powerful tool that can be used to reach people in ways you wouldn’t have been able to imagine just a few years ago. However, when it comes down to measuring the effectiveness of your social media strategy and getting an ROI on your time, it’s not as easy as simply posting things without thinking about them first. No one measurement or metric will tell you everything there is to know about your social media efforts. Instead, you need to look at multiple data points over time and ensure that they are consistent.
Track the right metrics.
Now that you have defined your goals, it’s time to set up a social media marketing strategy. The first step in this process is tracking the right metrics.
The most important thing to understand about social media analytics is that the focus should be on your business objectives and not on vanity metrics like likes or followers. This might seem obvious, but many businesses get distracted by the popularity of their posts or tweets and measure things like these instead of what matters—like sales revenue or lead generation. Don’t get me wrong: likes and retweets are great for customer engagement, but they don’t tell you how much money those people brought into your business!
To track the right metrics, ask yourself two questions: What does my objective look like? And how do I measure my progress toward achieving it?
Don’t stop at vanity metrics.
Vanity metrics are essential, but they’re not always accurate. For example, let’s say that you have a new client who sees an increase in their website traffic and social media followers after working with you. This is great—but it doesn’t mean that your work is directly responsible for the rise in followers.
Vanity metrics can be misleading when they’re used as an indicator of ROI (return on investment). For example, let’s say your agency creates a Facebook ad campaign for a client targeting people who live near their headquarters and have “hungry” interests. If the campaign has high click-through rates but low conversion rates, then the ad isn’t performing well from an ROI perspective. However, suppose this same campaign increases customer retention rates by 15% without driving a significant amount of new customers through sales funnel activity (like purchases). In that case, it may still be worth running because it helps retain existing customers and generates positive customer service experience ratings for future potential clients.
Get your metrics in one place, with a dashboard to see it all.
Once you have the basics, it’s time to put your dashboard together. A good dashboard will help you track your social media results and see how well your efforts are paying off.
There are a lot of different tools on the market that can help with this, so let’s take a look at some popular options:
- Hootsuite is one of the most popular platforms for managing all aspects of your social media accounts in one place. It includes analytics, scheduling tools, and more ways to measure results than any other tool we’ve listed here today. However, be aware that this does come with an annual fee. Still, there’s also a free version available for small businesses or individuals who need some basic features such as monitoring mentions across multiple platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
- Google Analytics will give you detailed reports on traffic sources and conversions from people visiting your website after finding it through search engines like Google or Bing Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This works exceptionally well if someone finds a blog post about something related to what they’re searching for (like “how do I make money”) and then clicks through to your site where they sign up for something like an ebook download before converting into becoming an actual customer who buys something else down the line such as purchasing product X from store Y.”
Compare, compare, compare.
The first step is to compare your results to your goals. If you’re not meeting them, then take some time to think about why. For example, are you targeting the right audience? Are you using the right platform? Is it a problem with your ad creative or campaign setup?
After comparing against your goals, it’s also important to contrast your results with other companies in similar industries. This will show whether or not any trends are occurring in the market and how they affect different businesses’ social media success.
Next, look back at past campaigns and see how far off from their targets each one was. Chances are that there were some big wins and some failures— if so, those failures can be used as valuable learning experiences when planning future campaigns!
Finally (and most importantly), don’t forget about competitors! It’s easy to get caught up in just looking at what’s happening inside our own company but ignoring what other people outside of it are doing could mean overlooking opportunities for growth or even threats that could end up hurting us down the line!
Create a report and review it regularly.
- Create a report. To keep track of your social media results, you should create a report to review regularly. Think about what you want to achieve with your social media campaign and ensure that your reports are specific enough to help you measure those goals.
- Review the results regularly and make adjustments if necessary. It’s important to review your reports regularly to see what is working well and what needs improving in future campaigns. This will also help identify any areas where future changes need to be made about resources or strategy.
- Know what you want from the start, but don’t overcomplicate things either! Don’t overwhelm yourself by trying too many different things at once—instead, focus on one area where you know there’s room for improvement first before moving on to another area later down the line (this will give more time for each change/improvement).
It is crucial to be able to track your social media results so that you can show your ROI and improve your processes where needed.
As a business owner, it is essential to track your social media results to show your ROI and improve your processes where needed.
There are many ways to measure the success of a social media campaign, and some of the most common are:
- Number of Likes and Shares
- Number of Comments
- Page Views (if you have an online website)
Conclusion
Tracking your social media results is not a one-time thing. It requires regular monitoring and analysis to improve on what works and ditch what doesn’t, as well as keep tabs on competitors and other businesses in your industry. This will allow you to stay ahead of the curve while also ensuring that your efforts are paying off financially!