The best tools and techniques to measure social media success
by Natalie Sisson
One key reason that so many small business owners shy away from social media is that they don’t know how to measure it. They can’t justify spending hours per day Tweeting, updating status and scouring LinkedIn, Facebook and more as they can’t see the direct leads or potential sales.
The reason for this is that is you need to know what you want to measure in the first place. You have to set goals as to what you want to achieve with all your hours invested. A great place to start is to ask yourself why you started using social media in the first place.
The freedom in measuring social media metrics
Are you getting more subscribers to your blog, more traffic to your website, more interaction on your blog posts and more online discussion on Facebook or Twitter? These are actually the things that matter most and are pretty easy to measure. There’s no need to overcomplicate things by searching for the perfect online metric or tool.
Most of the key tools have their own free analytics programs for you to use. Infact you can find all of the data you possibly need by using Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, YouTube Insights, WordPress Dashboard and metrics, and Hootsuite, a Twitter Client manager that tracks key metrics. These are all free and tell you all the data you need to know and measure. A rule of thumb is – so long as you see growth keep doing more of what you’re doing!
Commit to the long term for the best results
An important thing to recognize is that social media is like any other relationship you’re building, it takes time and effort. The returns of social media are not immediate and long tail content goes a long way. Spend the money to make an amazing YouTube video and it lives on forever. Spend money on making your Facebook page engaging and inviting and you will build long lasting fan loyalty. This is something you just can’t do with offline marketing.
Get analytical
Social media success should relate to your business objectives and goals. If you are trying to get more customers, you need to look at how many people you are reaching and how many of those are converting. You want to make sure they match up with your targeted demographics. Once again a tool like Google Analytics can tell you how many people visited a specific landing page on your website and from that number you can calculate from the sales you made how successful your sales funnel is.
You can use PostRank to see how your blog content is being shared and ranked by those reading it on social networks. It gives a great indication of what content is resonating with your community and visitors to your site. It gives you simple rankings in a daily email for your current and past content. From this you can see what's popular and what should write more about. This is handy for both blogs and websites.
Stay alert
If you are trying to increase brand loyalty, you need to look into your engagement levels. Are your customers commenting, retweeting or talking about your business? Google alerts is a handy tool to give you instant updates on who’s saying what about you and your competitor plus what’s going on in your industry.
If the number of people searching your brand's name and clicking onto your site increases, along with your traffic from Twitter, Facebook and your average number of sales, as no result of any new marketing campaigns, it's safe to assume your social media marketing efforts are working well. You can also use Tweetbeep.com and SocialMention.com to help you monitor what’s being said about you online.
Simply ask
Don’t underestimate the power of simply asking your current customers and clients how you are doing. Use free tools like Google Forms to create a simple survey that is easy to fill in and share and gives you the results directly in an excel spreadsheet or you can try Survey Monkey for free or low-cost options.
If you have an order form, you can insert a simple question at the end and make it very easy for your customers to answer. A lot of retailers use this strategy and offer a drop down menu of options to select the place they found you from. When you’re dealing with customers by phone, end with a question that you’d like answered about your customer service, delivery times, and product or service quality. Also, try Facebook Questions to ask a question on your page and tally the answers.
The clearer you can be about what your business goals are, the easier it will be to measure your social media success. The best advice is to focus on just a few key tools initially, such as Twitter and Facebook only for example. Once you’ve mastered your strategy for engagement, marketing, content and leads on these two tools you can start delving into LinkedIn and YouTube.
Natalie Sisson is a Kiwi Entrepreneur and Adventurer dedicated to finding creative ways to help you run your business from anywhere. She focuses on using online tools, social media and outsourcing to create more freedom in business and adventure in life. Her blog The Suitcase Entrepreneur features articles on all aspects of running a virtual business, a wealth of resources, biz and travel tools plus a large dose of inspiration, insight and intelligence.
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