Social media marketing is never a set and forget marketing channel. If you’ve created a Facebook page, Twitter account or Instagram profile, you still need to regularly review how each channel is performing and make tweaks or changes to your activity.
One huge lesson we all got from the major changes to Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm is that you can no longer rely on doing the same activity over and over again and expect to always get the same results.
Here are seven things you can do to review how your social media channels are performing:
Is the channel still relevant to your business? If you can’t answer this question, head over to ‘Social Media Channel Plan’ and work through the questions.
When was the last time you updated your branding? Do your profile pictures or cover images need refreshing? And is your branding consistent across all of your channels and aligned with your website?
Are all of your profiles fully completed and optimised fully? Do you have completed bios for Twitter and a proper ‘About’ section for Facebook? Make sure these are consistent with your branding and align with your website.
See how your awareness is performing. If you’re using social media to increase awareness of your brand, then you will want to examine metrics like reach and impressions, as well as clicks (especially those that drive traffic to your website).
Have a look at your engagement metrics. Each channel will have insights data that you can have a look at. Spend a little time looking at your engagement (likes, shares, comments) month on month for about 6 months. Do you see the engagement trending upwards? Are you getting better engagement in some channels?
Are you posting content at the right time of the day for your audience?
Do you have the right followers to match your desired target audience? For example, on Facebook, you can see in your insights tab, data that shows audiences data such as location, gender and age.
One of the most popular questions I get asked is “So how do I know if social media is working for me?”. The obvious answer is in the increased sales and customers coming your way, but there are other metrics that can help you understand what’s working and what’s not, and how to use them to change up your strategy.
Now a small word of warning to point out here, you do not want end up in analysis paralysis, that is, with so much data that you have no idea what it is telling you, or how to even know what to stick with or change. So, try and use a maximum of 2 to 3 key metrics that are the most relevant to you and measure those at regular intervals (either fortnightly or monthly, which ever you can resource).
Additionally, you will use different metrics based on what your objectives are, and where you are in the marketing funnel.
Let’s look at what data you can use, depending on where you are in your online marketing.
Metrics for awareness
Here, you’ll be using social media channels to grow awareness of your brand, and let prospective clients know that you are available to help them. We also call this the ‘know me’ phase.
Examples of metrics you can use to see how your awareness is increasing:
Increase (or decrease) in Facebook fans, Twitter followers or Youtube subscribers
How much traffic you drive to your website from your social media content
Video views on your Facebook or Youtube videos
Metrics for engagement
Once you start to gain a following, you’ll be looking to engage with them to create a relationship and warmth towards your brand. This is also known as the ‘like me’ phase.
Examples of metrics you can use to see how your engagement is increasing:
Likes, share and comments on your Facebook posts
Retweets and replies to your tweets
Comments on and sharing of your blog content
Metrics for conversion
This, as the name indicates, is where your marketing efforts converts to financial opportunities in the form of sales, whether its repeat business or brand-new customers to you business. This represents dollars in the bank, and an easy way to measure your return on investment (ROI).
But, there are other conversion points you can be measuring. For example, if you are running a campaign where you are building your email database, having someone fill out a form and give you an email address (or even a phone number) is also a conversion.
Define what conversion means for you within a specific circumstance and then measure that.
Over to you
Now that you know what to measure, how will you know if your marketing is adding value to your business?
Using Google Analytics to understand website traffic
Google Analytics is one of the top and most powerful tools for monitoring and analysing traffic on your website. The metrics it provides, give you valuable insights into website visitation and also behaviour – ie, who is coming to your website and what they are doing when they get there. It can also tell you how users are able to get to your website and the content they are interested in.
So what metrics do you need to keep an eye on to understand how your website is performing; and that will help you to get more traffic to your website? These are the things that you should be focusing on so that you will know what to do next with your campaign or with your site.
Keywords. It is very important to know which keywords drive the most quality. By knowing which keywords have ranked high, you can work on these keywords and use it more on your website in order to make it easier to rank higher in organic search.
Amount of Visits. It is essential to know the days and time that you have the most visit on your website. Having the knowledge of these important dates and time allows you to publish more content on that day where you will be getting more attention on your website.
Top Pages. Understanding which page (or pages) is effective and performing well, will help you to know what type of content people are most interested in. You can use that information to then create more of that type of content.
Referring Sites. Knowing what websites which are sending the most quality of your site, for example, which sites have mentioned your blog, your product or a social media channel that links your site is important. This is because, once you understand where your traffic is coming from, you can spend more time and resources in focusing on those sites and spend less time on those sites that are not performing well.
Overview of Visitors. When you know who your visitors are and their intent in visiting your website, you will know what interests them and you can tailor that in your content.
Google Analytics is great and is free. It has a number of features that allow you to review how well users are interacting with your content and site. This is very important because you can identify how you can improve your site and quickly adapt.
If you want help getting more out of your social media marketing, please download our free step by step guide today!
