“Social media is the ultimate equalizer. It gives a voice and a platform to anyone willing to engage.” – Amy Jo Martin
Businesses are increasingly investing their time efforts and money in various digital marketing techniques. Digital marketing is a necessity these days. Gone are the days when traditional marketing used to render effective results. With the advent of technology and change in the demographics of the consumers, newer marketing techniques are required.
Marketers are increasingly tapping the digital media for their marketing requirements. As a result, a lot of digital marketing techniques have come up like SEO, SEM, Website advertising, etc. One such digital marketing technique is social media marketing. Social media marketing is immensely popular among various marketers.
In fact, according to social media statistics, “more than 50 million organizations use FB Business Pages for promotion. 2 million Facebook clients utilize Facebook for publicizing. Pinterest drives 25 % of all retail site referral movement. 80% of organizations with more than 100 representatives utilize Twitter for advertising purposes.” These are just a few of the social media websites used for social media marketing.
With so many people using social media for marketing, one needs to know what social media marketing is. Search Engine Land defines Social Media Marketing as refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites.
Social media marketing is basically posting interesting and engaging content on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, etc. The idea is to attract people to your content, engage them, and then try to convert them gradually.
Why Social Media Marketing?
One might ask why social media is being used for marketing. Social media provides a very effective platform for marketers to increase their reach and interact with their customers directly.
Social media is something that almost everybody uses. More than 56% of line adults use more than one social media platform. From your grandfather to your house help, everyone is using at least one or two social media platforms. During the last decade, the number of social media users has grown extremely fast following the digital transformation trend.
Let’s take Facebook for example. In 2010 Facebook had about 400 million active monthly users. In 2020, one-third of the world population is using Facebook, or 2.6 billion monthly users according to the latest data from Statista. This is just one social media platform. Imagine the number of people a business can reach using social media marketing.
Social media is a platform for multi-lateral communication. People can comment on your content, they can share it with others. They can tell you directly how they feel about your products and services or your brand. Statistics say that 59% of Americans feel that social media has made it easier for them to get their questions answered by the brands.
If your content is relevant and valuable for them, they will start trusting you as a brand. And building trust is very important for increasing conversion rates. Original and unique content also has the ability to increase customer engagement. Customer engagement will not only improve your conversion rate but will also create customer loyalty. Your engaged customers can become your brand advocates and do word of mouth marketing for you.
Thus, social media marketing provides a lot of benefits. And Social media marketing strategies can be customized to suit your requirements and budget. It is pretty clear how effective social media marketing is and why is it used. But, there is no use of social media marketing if you are not able to measure your performance. How would you be able to know of your social media marketing strategy is effective or not? How would you know whether your social media marketing strategy needs any improvements or it doesn’t?
For answering all these questions, you need to measure your social media marketing performance. Let’s find out how.
How to Measure Your Social Media Marketing Performance?
“The more social media we have, the more we think we’re connecting, yet we are really disconnecting from each other.” – JR
There are many metrics that can be used to measure your social media marketing strategy’s performance. You can track your performance in real-time using analytical tools like Google Analytics. The metrics that you can track are click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, social media shares, number of followers, comments, likes, mentions, etc.
But, to effectively measure the performance of your social media marketing, follow the following steps.
Define Your Social Media Goals
You couldn’t tell if you have achieved a goal or not unless you know what the goal was. It is of utmost importance to define your social media goal well in advance. What do you want to achieve from social media? Are you looking for increasing website referrals? Are you looking for customer engagement? Do you want to create brand awareness or check your brand health? Do you want to generate more leads? Make a list of the goals that you want to achieve through your social media marketing campaign.
Use the Right Metrics to Measure Performance
Now that you know what you wanted to achieve from your social media marketing, it is time to translate your goals into metrics to make analysis easy. Metrics are simply the parameters that you are going to measure. For e.g., if your goal was to create customer engagement, metrics like the number of social shares, retweets, mentions, comments, etc. would help you ascertain how much engagement you have been able to create. But if your goal was to increase your website traffic these metrics cannot tell you if you achieved that or not. For that, you need to measure metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, URL shares, etc.
Find the Right Tools to Measure
After choosing the appropriate metrics, it is time to choose the rights tools to measure those metrics. There are many tools available to measure social media performance. You can use these tools right at the start of your social media campaign so that everything is tracked online.
Social media websites have their own analytics tool which can help you track your performance. Apart from that, you can use Google Analytics and other social analytics tools. You can search Google to find these tools. Many of these tools are free or come at a pretty affordable cost.
Analyze the Results
Using the analytics tools that social media platforms provide you would help you measure your performance very effectively. Once the results are in front of you, it is time to analyze. An in-depth analysis is required to understand how effective your social media campaign was. And if it was not effective, where was it lacking. What were the reasons? Create reports and take note of all these things in your next social media campaign.
Social media marketing takes a lot of effort and patience. It takes time for social media campaigns to generate favorable results. Monitoring social media strategies is very important. Keep on tracking your performance to make sure you are taking the right path.
