Social Media Marketing is an integral part of many businesses’ marketing strategy. However, many companies have no clear objectives when it comes to social media activities.
There was a time when being active on Facebook and Twitter was enough but now Instagram is gaining popularity. No matter what changes are in social media, we need to measure our social media marketing efforts to stay ahead in this highly-competitive place.
The first thing you must do is nail down your business goals basically what you want from social media marketing.
Here is the common objective most marketers focus:
• Increase Exposure Metrics: Reach, Impression, View
• Increase Traffic Metrics: Page views, Unique Visitor, length of visits
• Generate Leads Metrics: Hard as well as soft lead
• Improve Sales Metrics: Orders, New Customer and Sales Revenue
• Develop Followers Metrics: Fans, Followers
What are Social Media Metrics?
Social media metrics helps in measuring the value of our marketing efforts. The data and statistics of the social media network provides your overall marketing goals.
Metrics that drives awareness about your brand or company:
• Impressions: It is important to measure your impressions on social media. This is used as a metric in public relations and helps measure the impact of the content you put out. You can see how many times your content is displayed with the help of impressions. It means that your content was delivered to the feed. All social media channels measure impressions and you can view them per post too.
• Reach- Reach and Impressions are often confused and many think these two are the same. However, that’s not the case. Impression can be defined as the total amount your content was displayed whereas Reach tells about the number of people that have seen the content.
For example- if your reach is 300 but impressions are 450 then it simply means that the content was only seen once.
• Shares & Mentions- Through this metric, you get to know how many people join in conversation with your brand. Quality content is the foundation of social media campaigns. A good, informative content will help in sharing and getting reply from your audience. Something like retweet on Twitter can help reach your content to a larger group and will let you know whether your content is impactful or worth sharing according to your targeted audience. Once you identify which type of content generate the most engagement, you should optimize your content strategy accordingly.
• Ad Recall- Think about it, wouldn’t it be amazing if your audience remember your ads. There is a Facebook metric for that and it helps you compare the effectiveness of tactics. The estimated ad recall is based on the audience reached by these ads and how likely will they remember and recognize your brand.
Some example of ad recall tools are Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, and Google Analytics, all these are completely free.
Metrics for Increasing your sales:
• Click-Through Rate (CTR)- CTR is the ratio of the users that click your ad to users who only saw these ads. This indicates whether the ads are relevant or not.
• Micro Conversions- Measuring something huge like a campaign progress is tracking your macro conversions. Sales, for example are bigger goal so they are macro conversions and micro conversions, on the other hand, are small step towards your fundamental goal. It includes something like reading your web page or watching a webinar.
• New Visits- When it comes to your website, traffic is a good thing. Traffic means more visitors and these visitors can become your loyal customers. Social media networks finds report for ads and also track data to optimize the results for your brand.
Metrics For Driving Leads:
• Total Leads- You can easily measure the leads of your social media campaigns and this can be done by setting up your conversion goals. This measures accurately all your social media ad successes and what didn’t work out well.
• Referral Traffic- Google Analytics measures your site’s traffic against its conversions. This just means that you can track which traffic are converting into leads.
• Landing Page View- You can optimize landing page views by using Facebook ads. This measures the traffic that wants to go to your site. You can improve the quality of traffic to your site by optimizing ads and measuring landing page views.
Social media may seem like a small part of the bigger marketing strategy but with more people getting attracted to many social media platform like Instagram, this has become one of the most important aspect of marketing.
