Measuring social media isn’t as black and white as saying that one like or one follow is going equal $1 in return. If you’re a business owner and that’s where you’ve positioned your view on social media marketing – clear it now! There are other aspects that have to be executed properly before seeing social media success. In my previous post I highlighted the four stages of laying out your social media marketing conversion funnel. Now, I want you to look deeper at the tactics that must be executed to support your social media strategy.
Map Out Your Game Plan
Have you mapped out an action plan? I’m a big fan of using Mindomo as it offers a great visual way of looking at the big picture and seeing how everything is going to work together. Here’s an example:
Take time to really map out your tactics and focus on what will positively impact your business goals. Don’t create busy work. Create a workable plan that will drive traffic, leads and sales. From there, prioritize what’s most important and make sure you get into a routine of doing those things before anything else. Consistency will be key so build out a strong foundation to work off of.
Tools You Can’t Live Without
Analytics plays such a large role with measuring your social media success, so do some research on the different tools that are available and choose the ones that fit your analytics need. This will make your life easier and alleviate any crazy long hours of manual inputting. Here are a few that I recommend:
- Google Analytics: Surprising, right? Probably not. Utilize GA to track which social networks drive the most traffic back to your website and to which pages. You can also dive in deeper using advanced segments by narrowing down on search queries centered around questions or 2-3 plus keywords. This is a great way to see what people searched before they landed on your website. Use this type of data to optimize for long-tail keywords and even to help spur up blog ideas.
- Followerwonk: I love this tool for Twitter. You can search for influencers within your industry, discover when they tweet the most and easily analyze your own profile. All of this data will enable you to better optimize your tweets for the highest amount of engagement.
- Statigram: Now that Instagram has hit the 100 million active users mark, you’ve got to be a fool to not leverage this social network! Statigram’s dashboard is great as you get insight to new followers, lost followers, total number of likes, the virality of your posts and much more.
- PinReach: Here’s an easy dashboard to look at your Pinterest influence well into viewing any popular trends and pins. You can also view profiles that have the highest reach – this is a great opportunity to discover what these profiles are doing right that you can also do as well.
- Hootsuite: I’m a huge fan of using Hootsuite’s scheduling feature, URL shortener, the ability to manage multiple social networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, G+), loading the streams I want to see most and also the analytics. This tool has saved me so much time and taken away the need to log into different social networks just to make status updates.
Consolidate to One Reporting Dashboard
There isn’t one tool out there that’s all inclusive of the social networks out there, so you’re going to have to do a little bit of manual consolidation here. Don’t worry – this isn’t an all day type task as it’ll be a simple copy and paste. I recommend laying out an excel spreadsheet with the data points you deem as most important to your social media success. Input the data you receive from the tools you use and track how your efforts trend overtime. Some major data points I always make sure to track are:
- Visits, pageviews and referral sources
- Reach and growth
- Shares and Likes
- Downloads (applicable for whitepapers, ebooks, etc.)
- Sign-ups (includes email subscriptions, webinars, etc.)
Having the right set up is key to social media success. This helps you stay focused, building a strong foundation for business growth and profitability. And, through this process you also receive feedback from your target audience to further help you see what works and what doesn’t.
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