Most social media marketing strategists agree that there is no one, surefire framework to measure social media success. For small- to mid-sized businesses, though, social media has improved how companies can carve out space in an extremely crowded marketplace.
To successfully achieve your social media marketing goals—like improved brand awareness and increased sales—develop individualized, social media measuring tactics by following these three steps:
- Define your goals
You need to identify your marketing goals before you can assess your success rate. What do you want to accomplish through social media? Examples include driving more traffic to your website or increasing your fan base. - Establish baselines
Based on your unique goals, establish measurable baselines for later comparison. Include variables like website stats, Google hits, and current sales numbers. Obviously, some items are simpler to measure than others, like sales. - Track your efforts
Utilize numerous tools that can help you measure your social media marketing efforts. Here, remember two factors: First, use more than one tracking tool to gain a complete picture of how your efforts are paying off. Second, focus only on data relevant to your goals—it’s easy to get lost in the numbers.Some social media sites have internal statistics tools. Facebook Insights, for example, enables you to track demographics, referrals, and engagement, among other factors. Through HootSuite, you can utilize analysis tools to determine which Twitter tweets result in the most engagement. The site also tries to calculate the “sentiment” of your followers toward your tweets.Google has the best host of social media marketing analytics tools at your disposal. Google Analytics enables you track and analyze website and social media visitors. It also boasts a new feature, Social Value. This tool bridges the gap between social media marketing and business metrics. Social Value helps to identify traffic from social media sites, measures how this traffic leads to conversations, and enables you to make data-driven decisions in your social media marketing goals.
Specialist social media marketing companies like SevenAtoms can better assist you with devising tailored marketing goals and measuring your social media success rate.
Image By: Alan O’Rourke
