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May
May
Social media is turning into a fundamental aspect of marketing. However, it can sometimes be tough to determine the success of your social media posts.
How are you supposed to measure what you are doing well?
Use these five metrics to determine the value of your social media activity.
Lead Generation
Many people make the mistake of viewing social media purely as a brand-building medium or a way to connect with their current customers.
While it is a great way to spread brand awareness and build a community, don’t overlook the opportunity to generate new leads on social media. Paid and organic advertising can be used to your advantage.
Paid ads are all purchased and their location depends on the budget of the campaign — higher visibility costs more money. Paid ads are faster to implement than organic ads, and you can target a more specific audience and know exactly who your message is reaching.
Organic ads are basically the online version of word of mouth. These messages appear naturally in social media or elsewhere online, either as a direct result of your influence or because people share them individually. Organic ads’ location is not won overnight, so it can take a longer period of time to see results. The cost is relatively inexpensive or free, but once it is online you will have little control over how the message spreads and who receives it.
If you need immediate results and have the budget for it, aim for paid ads. Then, if you have a little more time, you can opt for mainly organic ads. The best decision is to invest in both paid and organic marketing.
By investigating the types of people who interact with your feed, you can learn what kind of posts will increase engagements. You can find leads by analyzing the number of people who repeatedly click on your ads as well as those that follow your brand and comment on posts.
Developing a cost per lead (CPL) campaign allows you to only pay for each explicit sign-up from people who are interested in your offer. Similarly, a “click like” campaign will only charge you for each user who hits the “Like” button.
You can also think about running a contest or an event campaign. A photo contest is a perfect way to build leads on social media due to its visual and interactive appeal. Encouraging users to share the contest to gain bonus entries can drive engagement even higher. Even an event campaign can give users a unique opportunity to interact with your brand outside of the usual channels and better understand your company’s focus and personality.
Anyone who likes your page, participates in your contest, or attends your event is a lead. Once you start using social media as the marketing channel that it is — one that can land new customers — it’ll help make your company more successful.
Followers
Counting your followers is probably the most obvious metric to use when evaluating your company’s social media prowess. It provides an accurate estimate of how many people might see any one of your posts.
Followers have signed up to get your posts sent directly to their phone, which demonstrates loyalty.
You will also be able to use your number of followers to set goals for the kind of numbers that your posts put up.
You don’t need every single user on the internet to follow your social media. It might surprise you to hear this, but 20% of your customers produce 80% of your business. It is an example of the Pareto Principle.
The Pareto Principle states that 80% of results come from 20% of causes. Try to target those heavy users — they are the ones who will be more likely to both engage with your brand on social media and turn into customers.
Concentrate on growing an engaged following. Study your followers, ask questions, and find something that will set you apart. Why should your followers interact with you? Appeal to things that they like and start conversations with them. When you engage individually with them, they will return the favor. You should be responding to every comment or post in some way.
Increasing your followers will let your posts reach a larger audience. Turning them into an engaged audience will build their loyalty and let you know who specifically you can target for a better chance of conversion.
Engagements
Social media platforms connect people with friends, family, events, and other businesses. You should take advantage of how people log on to social media to interact with content and communities.
You can start conversations with your followers and then track their interactions with your account.
Building a following is important, but it isn’t enough to have followers passively view your content.
You want them to engage with your posts. Likes, retweets, replies, and shares will all do wonders for boosting your profile and ultimately help you reach a more convertible audience.
Influencer ROI
Companies have long desired a way to achieve consistent word-of-mouth marketing.
A staggering 83% of consumers say they either completely or somewhat trust recommendations from family, colleagues, and friends about products and services — making these recommendations the highest ranked source for trustworthiness.
Influencer marketing also relies on an element of trust between influencer and user. Due to the nature of social media, followers either know the influencers personally or trust them as if they did.
You have a number of tricks that can help measure your influencer ROI. They can give out special codes or discount codes to use during checkout that will tag those purchases as being sent from the influencer. Or, you can figure out the number of impressions that influencers receive by calculating their social following or the number of unique visits to their blog each month. This will give you an idea of how many people saw your sponsored post.
One study found that the ROI of influencer marketing was 11 times that of a typical display ad and that’s just for blog posts, without taking into account social promotion.
Content marketing agencies have begun utilizing influencers as the valuable resource they are.
Referral Traffic
A large benefit of social media comes from creating posts that link back to your site. People may see your social posts, but not know about your products. By directing users to product pages, you can create referral traffic where your audience has an immediate line to your services.
Google Analytics tracks the people who are referred from your social media channels, which can be helpful to learn if your social media posts are effective.
Referral traffic will also tell which sources and methods are helping you the most. You’ll know exactly how many are a direct result of your social media posts and even see the ones that come from influencers.
Tagging ads with UTM codes will also tell you exactly where they come from. UTM codes are customized links that have a specific tag in the URL. These codes are useful to track social media campaigns in Google Analytics so you can tell exactly how many people reached your website due to this campaign.
Looking at these numbers, you can decide whether it is worth paying the influencer, continuing the contest, posting certain copy, or if you should change your social media strategy altogether.
Make Your Social Media Strategy Successful
Social media has unlimited potential for your company due to its versatile nature.
Thankfully there are some metrics that will tell you exactly how well it is working.
CPL advertisements and referral traffic will tell you where people are coming from and you’ll be able to calculate which methods are worth it.
Your follower count will give you a solid base around which you can set goals for engagements.
Finally, tracking your influencer ROI will help you spend your budget more effectively and use influencers who are actually reaching your target.
