Tech Talk: Tracking Engagement on Social Media
How do you know if a social post is just good or truly great?
The simple answer is, of course, revenue coming in. But there are SO many factors and pieces of data before your fan becomes your client.
There are a couple of key areas to gauge engagement on your posts. In fact, I created a short video about where your audience is going after they see your post.
That's just one of the tutorials we have in the Bright Moments' Hustle to CEO membership!
The top five metrics are:
Likes and Shares — The simplest metric you’ll need to track is the number of likes and shares that your posts receive. Most social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube have copied Facebook’s original “Like” feature, in addition to giving people the option to share content that they like or find relevant to their own friends or fans. Both of these options give you the opportunity to immediately get a sense of how your post is doing and to widen your reach considerably as people share your posts with their own audiences. But read on-- just because people like and follow doesn't automatically place them in your ideal client category!
Audience Growth/Rate of Followers — Another obvious metric to keep an eye on is the number of followers you’ve gained over the last month, week, or even day. It’s important to pay attention to the rate that you’re obtaining followers. If you see a slow and unreliable drip of people following your accounts, you may want to increase your posting frequency. If you’re losing followers, you should examine what has been shared or posted recently and question whether you need to adjust your strategy.
Reach and Lead Generation — Though a large part of social media marketing involves posting and sharing content, ideally your audience won’t just look at your posts and never engage with your business. You should be tracking the number of people that visit your site from your social media accounts, as well as which social media accounts generate the most leads. If the party is happening on LinkedIn, you should be posting more content there.
Click-throughs — When sharing blog posts or third-party content, it is important to measure the number of times that users have clicked on the links you’ve included. (Remember to house everything on your site or through a third-party app like LinkTree to maximize that one URL rule on Instagram!) This helps you determine how much traffic your social media efforts are bringing in and whether you need to post even more. It also shows you whether your content is aligned with your brand message and the target audience you’re trying to reach.
Organic vs. Paid Results — Organic traffic refers to the clients that you get through posting free content and the social community that you build. Paid social, on the other hand, refers to the advertisements or sponsored messages you’re using to try and reach target demographics. When running a pay-per-click campaign, it’s important to keep track of the return on investment to see whether you should re-invest in new keywords. ***We highly recommend holding off on paid ads until you've grown your audience or have the budget to pay for leads.
Where do I keep the data??
Like most things in business, it will depend on what you are tracking, how much data you need to see, and how often you want to look at it. Here are four options to check out.
Look into these five metrics if you haven’t already. Social media is a great source of leads, so you should do learn how to optimize your social strategy.
A marketing campaign should always be treated like a long-term experiment. Success isn’t earned by randomly posting content and hope is never a marketing strategy. Once you’ve created your posts full of valuable content and assembled your content calendar, selected your hashtags, and created the images to go along with them, you then need to monitor your progress and continuously adapt your strategy.
Remember: social media is an ongoing dialogue with your customers. And you can’t continue the conversation if you aren’t paying attention to what your ideal clients are most excited to talk about.