Social media can be a fantastic tool for helping businesses better connect with their audience and reach more potential customers, but many small business owners fail to actively measure the values of their social media marketing efforts, and fail to see the importance of doing so.
While social media marketing can elevate your business and help you stand out from your competitors, it can only do so if it’s being executed correctly, and any good marketing plan should be evaluated on a regular basis.
To help you measure your social media marketing values, here is a short guide:
Firstly, it’s important to understand the different types of social media measurement
- Ongoing analytics – these are day-to-day focused metrics with no definitive end, and once set up, a schedule can be arranged to check them. Ongoing analytics help you monitor the overall health of your brand and company.
- Campaign-focused metrics – with a definite beginning and end, these are used to target certain marketing initiatives.
Ideally, you should be employingboth of these.
Secondly, you should begin establishing your social media marketing goals
Accomplishing your company’s goals is so much easier when you use a variety of social media platforms, and by using the two methods mentioned above, you can spread awareness about your brand and keep a close eye on the activities and success rate of your competitors.
Then, to measure your goals, take the time to understand your metrics
Metrics that match your company’s goals are essential, and here are some of the most common metrics:
- Awareness – measuring the attention your brand is receiving can be done using @mentions, likes, shares, links and impressions
- Audience growth rate – compared to your competitors, how fast were you able to attract new followers?
- Post reach – how many people saw your post when it went live
- Potential post reach – the number of people who realistically could have seen your post
- Engagement – rate of likes, follows, shares and so on, in relation to your total number of followers
- Click-through rate – how often users are clicking on your call to action (CTA) in a post
Next, learn how to measure and monitor metrics
Some social media platforms such as Facebook, give you automatic easy-to-read metrics, and many social analytic tools are widely available with just a quick Google search. Setting up analytic tools before you begin a campaign is crucial, as it can be costly and time consuming to try and retrieve data retroactively, since these tools typically work in real-time.
Lastly, take advantage of customer testimonials
Positive testimonials are a direct reflection of how consumers view your brand and when shared, can help drive more customers to your business. You can create a norm of asking satisfied customers to leave a review,create a social media campaign specifically for customer testimonials, and link your Google My Business review form to give customers easy access.
If you lack the know-how or time to dedicate enough of your marketing efforts to social media, or have a strategy but aren’t sure how to monitor its effectiveness, it can be helpful to outsource your needs to a third party digital marketing company like Towers Marketing Group. Call us today and let us show you what the success we’ve had with our clients.
