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What? You’re seriously telling me – You spend 30 minutes – 1 hour using Social Media every single day and you’ve not been measuring or tracking how your Social Media Marketing has been going

I have that conversation with Small Businesses every single week and watch their faces when it dawns on them that they’ve been dabbling with Social Media for a year with little or no results.

More often than not these are established businesses who take marketing seriously and measure the results of traditional advertising such as flyer drops, cold calling, trade advertising and yet as the thought runs “Social Media Is Free” the time vs results are not measured

Social Media should drive awareness and engagement – but ultimately if you’re doing it right, it will deliver a ROI as well as the warm fuzzy feelings that come from engagement!

Here are 5 Metrics You Should Be Measuring Your Social Media Activity By

Quality vs Quantity
QUANTITY AND QUALITY OF FOLLOWERS

You may note i’ve put Quantity of Followers here as well as Quality and that’s important and i’ll tell you why

Firstly – i’m not advocating you go to a website such as fiver.com and buy Twitter Followers. There is no quick cheat method to building up an audience and if you go down the route of buying a fake audience, it not only will deliver no business as the accounts bought aren’t real, but it will also create distrust amongst your real followers.

What I mean by quantity of followers is the long term success of Social Media will not be built if you’re happy with just 5 twitter followers, 2 LinkedIn connections et all. Your marketing message will simply not be hitting enough people

There has to be an upwards trajectory on the number of quality (i.e targeted market via demographic, location, potential referrer etc) of followers you have in the same way you build connections on physical networking meetings

Tip: Make a list of 50 people you have met at Networking / Worked With Before … then Make a List Of 50 Perfect Leads For Your Business – Connect With Them On Twitter / LinkedIn!

Engagement
ENGAGEMENT
Let’s assume you have an audience of targeted connections and you’re posting every day on Social Networks

It’s a very simple question – BUT are your connections responding to you what your posting

Is there a flurry of twitter notifications, Facebook or Linked updates when you post or is there radio silence?

The key to getting Social Media Engagement is in the name – the word social – respond to others, ask questions, don’t just sell.

Tip: For twitter look at www.twitonomy.com for an overview of your engagement, Facebook it’s the People Talking About This Figure and LinkedIn Who’s Viewed Your Updates

Social Media Reach
SOCIAL MEDIA REACH
Reach IMHO is a very old school measurement that looks at the potential reach of a post via shares / retweets or via tracking a hashtag

To put it in traditional context the reach of your local newspapers is thousands plus the readers that they passed the paper on to. The readers may have just skipped over a certain page, so the reach isn’t an accurate reflection of how many people have read a specific article itself

Tools to track twitter reach via Retweets or hashtags therefore offer a potential audience, rather than the actual audience that actually stopped and read that specific post

The same is true of Facebook where it’s stated “XXX people saw this post” – the message may have been delivered to a screen / device, but it takes somebody on a mobile or desktop to actually stop and read them

Tip: Look at the timing of posts to see how this affects the reach of posts – literally 1 hours difference can make a massive difference so try A/B testing times

Google Analytics
WEBSITE STATS / GOOGLE ANALYTICS
If one of your key drivers for business is your website, then using social media to drive traffic to your website is a no brainer

Blogging can massively affect the amount of traffic that both organic search and also Social Media drives towards your website and using a free service like Google Analytics to track your Social Media acquisitions is key

Google analytics can tell you virtually anything you need to know about your website hits from which mobile device they are using to which town the visitors are from, but ultimately the key is what is driving traffic to the website and which pages they are landing on.

The 3 metrics above of Number Of Quality Followers + Engagement + Reach all should lead into Web Visits if your message is strong

Tip: Load up google analytics and follow this sequence – Acquisition > Channels > Social – don’t just look at what drives the most traffic to your site. Actively plan to increase other Social Channels

Sales via Social Media
SALES
Social Media doesn’t deliver ROI in an instant – like face 2 face networking it takes time to build meaningful relationships – but ultimately it should be generating sales for the business over time

As part of your records you should have a simple spreadsheet system that you can analyse each month which gives you all your sales information and what drove that sale

In the B2B world like many I work holistically, so at times certain sales are harder to attribute to Social Vs Email List Vs Networking, but by tracking the best fit you will start to build a pattern of what marketing channels are working vs which are not

Business i’ve worked with aren’t just driving micro-purchases via Social Media – but several £1000s worth of business in each sale

contact-us
GIVE US A CALL
Altrincham HQ have worked with 100s of business developing Social Media Strategies that deliver a true ROI

Our 121 Training is Bespoke – so we can spend half a day on tailored Social Media Training for your business

We also offer a 2 hour Analytics Section where we look at Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter Statistics and give you action points to improve

If you’d like to find out more look at www.altrinchamhq.co.uk or call 07806774279 to discuss Social Media Training / Management

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Alex McCann

Author Alex McCann

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