Want to know if all that time you’ve spent curating your company’s online presence has been worth it, or if you should even start?
You know that to achieve your business goals, you need to incorporate social media into your marketing strategy. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to know if what you’re doing is even working. There are many ways to assess your social media performance.
3 surefire ways to determine if your social media strategy is effective:
1. Vanity Metrics
One of the clearest and easiest ways to know if your social media strategy is working is analyzing the level of engagement you’re getting on each account.
Luckily for you, the statistics reports are already built into the platforms themselves. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even YouTube display these numbers so it’s easy to pull quick reports and make real-time changes to improve your social strategy on the fly.
If you’d like a more all-encompassing report that would provide easy-to-read graphics and comparison charts, you can use one of the many softwares available for free or with a subscription – including Buffer, Sprout Social, TailWind, and Hootsuite.
Focus your efforts on analyzing metrics that more accurately represent engagement and measure performance, including shares, retweets, saves, and reactions.
2. Site Traffic
It’s the moment of truth – are your social platforms generating traffic to your website?
To find out, you need to install a web analytics tracking tool. We recommend Google Analytics. This tracks the number of visitors to your site, the bounce rate (the percentage of users who enter the site and leave before viewing or interacting with other pages), conversion rate (the percentage of visitors that actually respond to your Call to Action), network referrals, landing pages, and user interactions.
It will also provide you with session statistics, including the following:
- How long each visitor spends on your site
- How many minutes individual visitors are spending on each page
- How many visitors have viewed your pages
With a service like Google Analytics, you can see how many people end up on your site from social media. If you’re utilizing custom tracking codes, otherwise known as UTMs (Urchin Tracking Modules), you’ll also be able to track the exact post and clicked link that brought them there.
A few other things you can do through Google Analytics:
- Receive visualized reports of traffic to each URL and the social platform of origin
- Generate graphs detailing the users flow
- Example: The exact route visitors to your site took — starting from the social platform, detailing every page they viewed, and marking at which point they left the site.
With these reports, you have vital information you’ll need to accurately calculate your return on investment (ROI).
3. ROI
ROI (return on investment) is the key to determining your social media’s effectiveness. This is how you assign a numerical value to the time, money, and effort you’ve invested into your online image and campaigns.
Once you have your vanity metrics, site traffic data, and other analytics reports, you can calculate your ROI. We suggest you get the most out of your analytics software by setting up custom conversions and events to show performance, efficiency, and impact, which will in turn tell you if it was worth it. This is a bit in the weeds, and you may need an agency to support you here.
When you first began your social media marketing, you should have set your KPIs (key performance indicators) as part of the planning process.
What are your quantifiable goals and objectives? KPIs can include the set amount of revenue increase (overall and per customer), your profit margin, client acquisition, and client retention.
To measure your performance, compare your metrics and analytics results to your KPIs. Did you complete these goals? Have your social media efforts gotten you closer to reaching your KPIs?
If the answer is yes – you’re doing this right. If the answer is no – it may be time to change your strategy.
Need to boost your social media marketing game?
Book a free 15-minute Discovery Call with TwoTone Creative, and together we’ll create a social media strategy sure to give your business a boost.
As our resident social media expert, Sydney provides innovative perspectives to help organizations achieve their goals through various social media platforms. Her highly organized approach ensures clients get the strategy they need, at the exact moment they need it.
