Social media is full of opportunities for expanding your business but getting started on social media without a plan sets you up for failure; it will be exhausting, time-consuming, and potentially fruitless. Like any marketing your business does, social media marketing deserves a dedicated strategy developed with your business in mind. An essential piece of your social media strategy is setting goals and using analytics to meet your goals.
Many social media sites offer dashboards with various analytics presented to you, but what metrics are helpful for your brand and relevant to your goals?
Here is a guide to assist you in tracking metrics to measure and achieve your social media goals and overall business objectives.
Set goals
What are your goals specific to marketing on social media? By setting goals, you will specify your intention more, making it easier to achieve your goals and see growth. Without goals, it won’t be easy to know where to begin or measure your social media success. When setting goals, remember to set S.M.A.R.T. goals– specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound goals.
An example of a S.M.A.R.T. goal for social media would be to increase impressions on Instagram by 30% over the next quarter.
Determine what metrics to use for goals
While it might be nice to boast a large follower count on social media, this isn’t the only or even the most valuable metric to consider for your goals. Here are some essential metrics to track on social media. You will find that each metric helps measure your success for a particular social media goal, such as brand awareness, engagement, consumer sentiment, and conversions. In addition, these goals can be directly used to meet your brand objectives, such as growing your brand, building a group of advocates, increasing sales, and improving customer loyalty.
Reach
Post reach is a staple in social media metrics. Post reach determines how many people are seeing your post. This is a better metric than just looking at likes, as it shows the number of users who were exposed to your content regardless of their decision to interact or not. This metric will help you determine ideal times to post and determine your most valuable posts, the posts your audience pays attention to. When you check your analytics, most social media sites will tell you your reach per post, so you don’t need to calculate this yourself. This metric is an excellent way to measure brand awareness, contributing to growth for your brand.
Conversion rate
The conversion rate is the number of users that take action after engaging with links shared on your social media accounts. Tracking this number relies on your website, which may already have tracking for analytics like this. If it doesn’t, simply utilize cookies on your website to keep track of visitors. This way, when a link is shared to social media, and a user clicks on it, you will be able to track if they took action on your site, giving you a number of conversions. To calculate your conversion rate, take your conversions and divide them by the total clicks for the link. This metric is crucial because it shows you how compelling your call-to-action is. It also directly relates to your business and website traffic rather than your external social media accounts. This metric can be a good measurement of how well you are driving sales.
Conversation rate
The conversation rate is the ratio of comments to followers for your social media account. Getting engagement and starting conversations on social media is essential to building awareness and prominence to establish your brand as a leader in your niche. The conversation rate essentially shows how effective you are at generating conversation on your posts and how willing your audience is to engage with you directly. To determine your conversation rate, take the number of comments during a defined period and divide that by your follower count. This metric is a good measurement of engagement which can turn your customers into advocates for your brand.
Social Share of Voice
Social share of voice is an important metric that places your success in the context of your competitors. One of the benefits of social media is that it can be used as an opportunity for you to cement your brand as a knowledgeable leader in the industry. Social share of voice measures the awareness of your brand compared to competitors on social media. To measure social share of voice, take the number of mentions for your brand, direct @mentions and indirect mentions, and divide it by the total mentions for your brand and competing brands. This metric is a good way to measure brand awareness, contributing to growth for your brand.
Testimonials, Customer satisfaction scores, and net promoter scores
These are all methods of measuring how happy and loyal your customers are and give you valuable insight into your customer retention. By asking your social media followers to fill out testimonials or surveys, you get direct feedback. Testimonials are open-ended and suitable for building positive feedback from your audience to promote future growth. Customer satisfaction surveys are ideal for determining how customers feel about your brand. Finally, net promoter surveys can determine how loyal and engaged your customers are and potentially estimate future engagement. This metric is a good way to measure consumer sentiment and can be used to improve customer loyalty.
Social media is one part of the equation to overall online success for your business. Managing your website and tracking its growth is easier than ever with Hotwire Networks websites. At Hotwire Networks, we can support you in building a responsive and attractive website to promote on social media.
