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How To See If Your Social Media Work Is Doing Any Good
Do you know already?
Business owners are routinely advised these days to launch social media profiles as part of their marketing strategy, but if you are wondering if the effort involved is paying off, here’s what to check:
Since entrepreneurs are busy people, trying to keep many plates spinning at the same time, sometimes a course gets set without a lot of forethought. Then, when there’s a moment to come up for air, it’s hard to analyze what’s been done and whether it was worth doing at all.
While planning ahead can be a challenge for creative types, it is truly the only way to know where you are headed and how close you are to arriving. Here are the questions you need to answer to accurately judge the success of your social media marketing strategies:
What is your social media goal?
Decide whether you want to increase engagement, traffic to your website, brand awareness, or some other goal. Except for a few specific industries, social media is not often an effective sales outlet. More appropriately, you might want to build an online community to support your sales efforts and gather leads for pursuing further sales. Or maybe your goal is to provide customer service by posting usage details and other information. Whatever you choose, don’t forget to include a suitable Call To Action.
Keep in mind that prospective clients come from many places, including old-fashioned face-to-face networking events, and one of the first things people do is look at your online presence. If you haven’t tweeted since 2008, consider what kind of impression you are making.
How will you track your progress toward the goal?
You have to measure to know what’s successful and what’s not. Counting how many followers you have is one measurement, but engagement is more important. Check on events like how many of people signed up for your newsletter and how many arrived at your sign-up page but didn’t actually sign up. Armed with statistics like those, you can tweak your social media message and your web page’s call to action.
Each social media platform may have their own report and there are third-party tools that can help you analyze the data as well. And don’t forget to compare results with your website’s Google Analytics. That can tell you a lot as well.
What is strategy should you follow?
Start with what you know, test, tweak and test again.
For instance, let’s say you provide landscaping services. Your goals are to build a strong online presence and gather emails addresses for future marketing. Your research says women with young families most often make the decision to hire a landscaper and those women spend a lot of time on Pinterest. So you post some photos on Pinterest of “The Ugliest Lawns in Mytown” with a link to a page on your website where they can email their own photos of ugly lawns. Check your analytics and tweak a bit. Was there an increase in visitors? Are they leaving their email addresses on the contact form? What happens when you try “The Ugliest Lawns in Nexttown” instead?
In the Olden Days, you would buy space in a single edition of a newspaper, get one shot at your message, and wait for the phone to ring. With social media marketing, you can reach out multiple times with different messages and easily measure your results as you go. With a little bit of research and strategy, not only can you know IF your social media is working – you will know exactly how well!
Because social media is such an important tool for website promotion, we offer several levels of social media management services. Give us a call today to learn which social media package would be best for your business.
Photo by Alesia Kozik from Pexels
This article is an update to “Is Your Social Media Working?” dated 8/4/2014.
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Kate Gingold
I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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