As a business owner it can be really easy to fall into the trap of working in your business rather than on your business. One of the symptoms of this is dedicating yourself to a social media marketing strategy, without ever taking the time to track your results and check that the strategy is actually working for you.
A lot of business owners tend to forget about tracking their organic social media performance and prioritise monitoring their paid marketing strategies. As they believe that their organic social media efforts only costs them time and not money and are therefore less important. This is completely incorrect. If you are a business owner time is money! So if you are wasting your time and efforts on an organic social media strategy that isn’t working, you are ultimately wasting your businesses money.
With that said I know that it can be extremely hard for business owners to keep on top everything, most business owners are usually juggling a hundred and one things a day. I have put together three basic ways of evaluating your social media marketing so you can measure how effective your social media marketing efforts are, and see if you need to re-evaluate things. If you follow my advice, it should make evaluating your social media accounts a lot easier. These tips will save you time and ultimately money in the long run.
1. Followers
If you have been plugging away at a particular social media site such as twitter for 12 months and have only gained twenty or so new followers, there is a pretty good chance that this isn’t the best social media account for you to be focusing your efforts on. Don’t get me wrong you shouldn’t expect to have a thousand followers straight away, however you should expect to be seeing a continual steady growth of followers over time.
I recommend you make a note of days when you have had a big spike in followers or a large loss of followers, if either happens look back to see what people either really loved or really hated about your tweets during that time and learn from it! Take a look at what you tweeted to cause the reaction and if you had an increase in followers because of those tweets, do more of those types of tweets. If you had a decrease in followers because of those tweets stop doing them!
2. Engagement Rates
You need to pay attention to your social media engagement rates, whilst followers are important engagement rates are actually more important. It’s far better to have 500 followers that actually interact with you and your posts than to have a thousand followers that totally ignore you! Do your followers like, comment, share and retweet your posts? The more engagement your social media accounts get the better, as this means that you are actually in conversations with people and they feel a connection to you and your business. Which means you have a far better chance of them actually becoming your customers. Take a look at what social media posts generate the most interaction and see if you can find a pattern of what your potential customers want to see and what they ignore.
3. Website Traffic
Does your social media actually send people to your website? You can use tools such as Google Analytics to check where your website traffic is coming from and use it to see if visitors are actually arriving at your site from your social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter etc. To find out more about Google Analytics check out our Google Analytics Guide For Dummies.
At the end of the day you don’t truly succeed with social media marketing until you get people off social media platforms and onto your website or into your shop etc. The point of these metrics is to make you aware of what is working and what isn’t working, so that you can evaluate your social media marketing strategy.
Following the above tips should help you to evaluate what is working for your business’ social media accounts and what isn’t. For more social media tips check out https://blog.jdrgroup.co.uk/digital-prosperity-blog/topic/inbound-marketing-seo-ppc-social-media-video
