Social media has grown over the years into a medium that combines technology and social interaction to give marketers a voice to connect with peers and potential consumers. Social media also personalizes your brand and spreads your message in a more conversational tone. Determine what it is you hope to accomplish by utilizing social mediums and be sure to set realistic expectations. If it is to simply drive leads to your sales groups, keep in mind your sales cycle. If it takes 12 to 18 months to close business, you may not see an immediate return on your social media efforts.
While social media is more of a key aspect of lead generation and analytics tools to help measure the effectiveness and efficiency, here are some ways you can measure the success of your social media outlets.
Identify Key Performance Indicators
Your Key Performance Indicator or “KPI” can potentially help you identify what is working or what is not working. Identifying your KPIs could help you determine what you hope to accomplish by utilizing social media.
Analytics Tools
Utilizing analytics tools could benefit you by keeping track of things such as website clicks or your statistics such as followers and the number interactions with your content. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics could make measuring your social media success easier as well as potentially identifying your KPIs.
Landing Pages
Measure the amount of leads generated through social media by customizing contact information using custom links that lead directly to landing pages on each social media platform. Keep in mind that creating a large following doesn’t happen instantly. It takes time to create brand awareness and to grow a following.
Create a Starting Point
Creating a starting point could prove to be beneficial when measuring the success of your social media platforms. Recording the obvious stats such as number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and Instagram followers could be a good place to start. Taking note of the less obvious stats such as SEO rankings and referrals can possibly help you obtain a more accurate understanding of where your social media is currently sitting.
Look at your Engagement
Take a look at how individuals interact with your content on different social media platforms. By measuring your engagement, you can gain access to information that can be vital in improving your brand across social media. Examples of engagement could be things such as clicks on the links in certain posts or retweets and mentions on Twitter. If you find your engagement level to be relatively low, then take a step back and ask what you can do to create better content.
Social media can be a difficult medium to conquer and you might not see the results right away. But utilizing these 5 tips could possibly help you analyze your brand and possibly help you figure out what your next steps are.
What is it your business is looking to achieve by utilizing social media? How do you plan to measure the success of your social media efforts?