Social media has become a key marketing tactic for most businesses, but most haven’t set any social media goals and that might be slowing them down.
Without goals, it’s hard to know how successful you are in what you’re doing. You can’t know where to improve and where to focus your attention.
You might be wondering – how to measure social media success?
Social media isn’t very hard to measure. It features a lot of analytics tools. But measuring success is solely dependent on the goal.
Some goals require tracking of link click or website visits. Some goals will require tracking of post reach and engagement. The tracking differs for most goals.
Just taking the fact that almost 3.5 billion people – or close to 50% of the population is on social media should tell you that it is an effective business tool.
You could have many social media goals and objectives, but it’s generally a good idea to have the main objective that you’re gonna be trying to accomplish using social media. Such an objective could be increasing revenue through social media or driving more free traffic through social media.
But remember, your main objective should be broad. The sub-goals you’re gonna set should be specific.
Here are 5 things the social media profiles should bring to your business.
1. Drive Traffic to Your Website
Most of the online businesses use social media to drive traffic to their website and ultimately increase sales. But having a website is crucial even for a local business.
There are many ways you can drive traffic through social media, such as sharing blog posts, posting events, asking consumers for opinion, and more.
But it’s also crucial to note that if your website is sub-par, you’re gonna get a really high bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the number of visitors that leave immediately after opening the page.
If users come to your website and it performs badly, slowly or both, they might not come back to it.
To reduce the chance of that happening, you need to make sure your website is super-fast. This is accomplished with a reliable website hosting provider that will deliver your website to the user as fast as possible.
As around 50% of visits now come from mobile, you also need to make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
How to measure social media traffic?
There are a couple of ways to measure traffic coming from social media:
- Google Analytics (Acquisition > Channels)
- Link Clicks / Landing Page Views on the platform
Google Analytics will also let you track the bounce rate of any separate channel of traffic:
2. Generate Leads
Lead generation is essentially getting the customer to leave some personal information on your site, usually an email address.
It’s a tactic salesmen use to warm up the customers before selling them something. It usually features a link that goes to a page where customers leave their email and start the sales process.
This process is mostly done on a website, but Facebook has introduced a lead generation ad campaign which is quite useful.
Instead of making the customer click a link and then leave their email when the customer sees this ad, they can immediately enter their email straight through Facebook. This removes one step from the process, which ultimately results in more generated leads.
How to measure lead generation?
There’s really only one way to measure lead generation and that’s to see how many people left their email or other personal details.
You can do this through:
- Facebook or the social platform of your choice
- Your email marketing tool
- Google Analytics (or possibly another analytics tool)
3. Increase Your Revenue
If lead generation isn’t your cup of tea, you can start selling through social media. You can do this by making sign-ups or sales through social media as one of your social media goals.
Social media platforms have gotten pretty smart at it and Facebook now offers a campaign goal called “Conversion”. This will optimize your advertisement for sales and using their pixel, will track sales on your website.
How to measure revenue growth?
To measure revenue growth efficiently, you’ll need Google Analytics and even Facebook Pixel if you’re using Facebook for your ads. Facebook pixel might be the better option for measuring your social media marketing goals in this case.
If you’re doing Facebook ads:
- Install a Facebook pixel on your website
- Go to Columns > Customize columns
- Select what you need (Add to cart, Purchases, Checkouts initiated…)
If you’re not using Facebook ads:
- Go to Google Analytics
- Go to Conversion > Goals > Set Up Goal
Alternatively, go to Admin > Goals
Here you can set up a value per conversion, but it’s optional.
4. Grow a Community Around Your Business
Getting likes, followers and comments is great. But what’s better is growing a community around your business.
Some businesses create Facebook groups, some create Slack groups, some use hashtags. You can use anything, get creative.
The important thing is to utilize this community to fulfill your main objective. You may want to set goals for your community, like sharing or tweeting a post you give them and similar.
How to measure community growth?
The measurement method will vary with the type of community you create and the social media goals you set for it. But here’s a basic list of measurement methods:
- Hashtag growth can be measured with Hashtracking
- Facebook groups can be measured with Grytics
- Telegram groups can be measured with Teleme
This is not to say that you can’t track these manually if you don’t want to pay for the services, but it could get annoying once the numbers grow big.
5. Engage With Customers
54% of customers now prefer social messaging for customer support over phone or email.
And that’s a surprise to absolutely nobody. Social media often provides easier and faster communication, with the ability to talk directly to the brand without long waiting lines like the ones on support phones.
But it can also help to increase revenue. Customers would pay 20-40% more to brands that engage with them on Twitter.
That’s why it’s a very good idea to reduce your response time on social media. Facebook now includes an average response time on pages, even before you’ve tried to send them a message.
Social Media Goals are Important
Setting social media goals is one thing, but then you’ve got to go to work on them. Make sure to set goals you can measure because that’s the only way you’ll be able to see how successful you are.
A good idea is to use the SMART system for setting social media goals.
- Specific: A clear and detailed goal is easier to complete.
- Measurable: Make sure you can measure the success of your goal.
- Achievable: Your goal should be achievable and not too far-fetched.
- Realistic: You can define how realistic a goal is in comparison with the resources you have.
- Time-Sensitive: Your goal can be long-term or short-term, but make sure you have set a time-frame.
Good luck with achieving your social media goals and objectives!
