With the boom of social media in the past few years, we are seeing increasing numbers of companies integrating social media into their marketing strategy.
This modern form of marketing doesn’t always work with traditional practices and models, and it is often considered hard to find the real and measurable value behind the fans and followers. Typically bosses are data-driven and they don’t want to hear about fluffy statistics, they’re after hard figures that relate to sales and profit. Social media is still relatively in its infancy when it comes to its measurement, so how can we give them the proof that your social media efforts are actually working?
Finding your fans and followers is important, as without them, your communication efforts could go unnoticed. However, just having a large audience and looking at these so-called vanity-metrics doesn’t necessarily mean that your campaigns are a success or creating ROI. Instead, it is important to focus on the level of engagement and interaction from your audience.
The goal of most social media campaigns is to provide a platform on which people can engage with your brand. Engagement allows people to make noise around your brand, share, visit more frequently, create referrals, buy into your brand, and ultimately purchase your products or services. Measuring the success of this complex and changing buying process is notoriously difficult due to the large amounts of data that can be incurred. By using KPIs and relating them to your social efforts, you can gain a better understanding of your business goals.
How can I set KPIs for Social Media?
So, in terms of analytics, we could track the following:
Traffic data
How many visitors did social media drive to your site?
Fans and follower data
How many people are in your various networks and how are they developing?
Social Interaction data
How are people interacting and sharing your content on the networks?
Social content performance
How is the content that you produce performing on social sites?
The basic principles of a traditional marketing campaign are still present when using social media channels; the social media platform is just another tactic in the marketing mix. You need to think in terms of what you want to achieve in order to set successful KPIs to measure your progress against.
These KPIs could relate to gaining networks, getting more conversions or creating brand awareness. You just need to make sure they are measurable by committing to exact figures, defining a way to track your progress and making sure it always relates back to your other marketing and sales objectives.
What tools can I use to measure my success?
Facebook Insights for brand pages is a great little tool that can break down the data for you. It shows the number of viewers, and how many people have created their own post and shared your post by their comments, likes or shares.
Here you can track key metrics over time, including the size of your fanbase, the reach and effectiveness of your content, the quantity of likes and shares of your content, demographics of your fans and more.
Google analytics is also a very useful reporting tool, with its social engagement and graph reports. This shows you the traffic from each social platform, and it even shows the traffic from specific posts. It also reveals how users get to your site and how they use it once they land there. Using this data and comparing it to your bounce rates and new visits from each platform can help you understand how your content is being used and how best to optimise it.
Using these social tools from Google Analytics along with setting up conversion tracking means you can use the social value report. This can give you a good indication of how social is influencing your conversions, as it categorises visitors into two groups: assisted social conversions and last interaction social conversions. The first includes people that had a social interaction somewhere along their conversion path. The second only includes users who came directly from a social source to a conversion.
There is a wealth of other tools out there to help you track and analyse your social media. SEOMoz have a really useful blog post, jam-packed with metrics to look out for on each platform and a list of tools you can use here.
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