Do You Know if Your Social Media Efforts Are Working?

Ever since major social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter started offering special profiles for companies and organizations, marketing specialists have been singing the praises of social media as the ultimate platform for online branding.

While it is true that many brands have achieved marketing success from their social media efforts, they have been able to do so by means of measurements and adjustments.

Once you establish an online presence on various social networks, the first measurement you will encounter will be engagement, which is a term that describes the aggregate of the reactions and interactions that result from your activity. It is easy to see your engagement on a daily basis; if your company is active on social media, you can see how many followers you are accruing, you can see if they like your updates and you can read their comments to get an idea of the opinions they have about your updates.

Observing daily engagement can be a highly subjective exercise, which is why you need more measurements in addition to this. There are two recommended methods of reading and interpreting your social media marketing efforts: analytics and return on investment (ROI).

Analytics

Most social networking sites offer tools that present you with engagement metrics, which are called analytics. Facebook, for example, offers Insights, a way to track the performance of your branding efforts. The metrics shown by Facebook Insights focus on engagement as well as reach and progress.

Advanced, social media management tools, like Manalto, offer you comprehensive analytics that track your performance. This is useful in terms of seeing how your efforts are stack up and tracking your progress against your social media goals.

ROI Measurement

If you have tied your social media goals more to bottom line measurements, versus engagement and interaction, you may want to delve into ROI. There are a number of ways to measure ROI; one of the most useful is through conversions.

When you measure conversions, you are looking at how many people took action on your updates and other branding efforts. The most common way to entice conversions is to target prospects with a call-to-action that entices them to become clients or customers.

You have to assign a value to actions when measuring ROI. Let’s say you sell an eBook for $7.00; if you run a Twitter ad campaign to promote your eBook for $90 and manage to sell 25 downloads, your ROI is nearly 2:1.

ROI measurement does not always have to involve hard figures such as conversions to paying customers. Lead generation from social networking is also valuable; in this case, you have to assign a dollar value to lead potentials. For example, if your boutique publishes a seasonal newsletter that presents new fashion trends, you can always entice your followers to subscribe.

Measuring your social media marketing is crucial in order to have success.  Taking the time to effectively measure your social media efforts is important in understanding what is working and what is not working. When you discover what is not working, move on quickly and try something new with your audience!