Ever been perplexed when queries about the ROI of the social media campaign for your business? You’re not alone! It’s easy to fall back on the basics when you answer this question –– your Twitter followers increased and your Facebook shares were impressive. These metrics certainly offer you surface-level insights into your campaign performance, but do they really show you value when it comes to making a real impact on your bottom line? Probably not! Social media isn’t as simple as tracking numbers to figure everything out. In fact, it’s probably time to move social media metrics up a notch to better monitor how your efforts are paying off.
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What Makes Your Social Media Efforts Tangible?
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Track Click-Through And Bounce Rates For Links
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Track Share Of Traffic And Not Just Web Referrals
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Track Rate Of Amplification Over Number Of Shares
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Track Social Share Of Voice With Mentions
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Track Conversation Rate Over Comments
When you’re looking to manage your social media campaigns, you’ll certainly want them to be scalable, so factors like engagement, growth, results and momentum are vital to your metrics. Growth isn’t just about numbers and followers, it is about how you interact with these followers that can make a difference to the way you do business. If you’re not engaging with your target on social, then you may need to re-look at what you’re currently doing. Momentum shouldn’t just be about crunching increased followers. It should ideally track the value they bring to your business. Tracking results is vital to any campaign success, including social. Changing the way you perceive social media metrics is important because it helps you step away from mere numbers to tracking value beyond the basics. This commentary helps you step up the way you analyze metrics with these nifty strategies.
If you share your business content on social media, it’s likely that you’re monitoring users clicking through to read the content. Click-through rates are important for analyzing success because they indicate whether your messages are compelling enough to resonate with the interest of your target. But they are far more valuable when paired with bounce rates. A bounce rate is the percentage of readers leaving your site after only one page. In this instance, it would probably be someone who has clicked on a Twitter or Facebook link, arrived at the page and left quickly without viewing other content. Bounce rate tracking allows you to powerfully demonstrate the ROI of your social media campaign when compared with other web traffic sources. If your bounce rate is relatively low on social media, you’ll know that readers are clicking through more pages on your website –– building tremendous value for your business over time.
If you have a high bounce rate on social media, but are garnering more traffic, social is still not doing its job in the way you want. That’s why your social media metrics should move beyond traffic driven to social-driven share of traffic. This puts your social media campaign up against other digital channels like display ads to help you determine the true value for your business marketing efforts online. Let’s look at this with a tangible example – assume your website received 100,000 visitors for a month, where social drove 20,000 visitors. This means that social drove 20 percent of your web traffic for the month. You can then compare this with other marketing channels to determine whether it is adding enough value to your business.
You probably track the number of times your content is shared over the Internet, but is that driving true value to your business needs? Instead of merely tracking how many times your content was shared on social, consider tracking the rate of amplification.These metrics measure the per-post share ratio to your number of followers of page likes. This means that followers are already associating themselves with your brand, so you can track how actively they are sharing your content. You can then tailor your strategy to ensure that your content resonates well with your followers.
Tracking number of mentions is important because this indicates the extent to which people are discussing your business on social media. But you can amplify the value of this metric tool when you track your social share of voice against your competitors. Your social share of voice tracks your mentions within the industry stacked up against competition. This allows you to determine how many competitors are on social media and if they are doing some things better than you. Through this metric, you can tailor your social media strategy to resonate more with your audience needs, which will help to boost your bottom line over time.
Many metric reports measure the number of comments left on every post. But this is useless if it wasn’t given any context, especially when you consider that some comments may have nothing to do with the post in the first place. A better way to measure is to track conversation rate over just comments. Your conversation rate is the per-post comment ratio to your number of followers. This can help you measure how your followers engage with your content on social. You’ll then know whether your content was compelling enough to spark discussions.
Social media metrics have transformed from mere measurement tools to real value adds for small, medium and large businesses because they help you monitor how effective your campaign is against competitors in the industry. It is certainly not difficult for you to incorporate into your social media strategy, so be sure to ride the wave of success through smart online engagement.
