Marc Fischman, co-founder of Hyperactivate, was right when he predicted that the biggest marketing trend to come would be the effort to provide measurements for social media promotions. It makes sense to us marketers for a number of reasons. The biggest being how deeply immersed we are in the digital age. Nowadays, everybody is tweeting, Instagramming, and Facebooking to promote their brand. However, using social media to gain awareness is one thing, but using metrics to track this social media success and develop further marketing strategies from these results is another. It's become clear it's not enough to track a single metric (like Facebook followers). Instead, metrics consist of the big-picture social media footprint that offers true insight into a brand's level of online engagement. That's why today, we've come up with four questions to ask yourself about how effective you use metrics to track your social media success.
How to Use Metrics to Track and Increase Social Media Success
How effectively are you using metrics? Ask yourself these following questions and learn how you to improve your strategy:
1. When Are You Posting?
The first question and possibly the most important: when are you posting? Moreover, what's the point of creating killer content if no one is going to see it? That's why downloading a social media organizer such as Buffer is incredibly useful in increasing your social media success. Buffer eliminates the burden of trying to determine when your optimal times to post are by tapping into your social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and seeing when the most eyes are on your page. This makes it so you know you're not simply throwing your content out there and hoping people see it. Instead, you'll know for sure your content you worked so hard on is getting the attention it deserves.
2. Who's Who and Who's New?
Next up, ask yourself what does your fanbase look like and how are you tracking new faces? Lucky for you, monitoring your follower growth is actually easier than you think.
For Facebook, just go to your page and click the Insights tab. There you can use the Likes button to view how many likes your posts receive and who is liking them.
On Twitter, you always have your follower count in the top left. However, you can view your overall social media success by clicking the Tweet Activity chart in the right corner of your profile page. This let's you see everything from your best tweets to how many likes each of them got to how many people began following you after sharing your tweet.
Pinterest is, however, a little different. For monitoring your social media success on Pinterest, we recommend using Tailwind. Tailwind is a social media organizer like Buffer, however, each week it sends you an email of your overall performance review. More specifically, it shows you what pins captured your audience's attention, the amount of repins and likes you received, as well as how many of these users started following you.
3. How Do You Respond to a Response?
You may be posting engaging content, but how are you responding to this engagement? Are you even responding at all? Asking questions on Twitter, posting a thought-provoking video on Facebook, or asking your followers to comment their thoughts on your Instagram are all great ways to connect with followers in a way that feels authentic. However, don't just throw an inviting post out their and leave your followers hanging! Take the time to respond back to mentions, reply to comments, and acknowledge retweets, repins, and shares. Use your metrics to see who is responding to your posts and learn how you can connect with this possible client.
4. What Content Is Working and What Isn't?
You may be producing content consistently, but how can you tell the good from the bad? With content shares! Content shares are great metrics to shape your social media marketing strategy because they tell you how your audience is perceiving your content. Interpreting content shares is simple: highly shared posts mean your post was inspiring or helpful to your followers. Content shares on Twitter are your retweets which you can find in your notifications or Tweet Activity Chart. On Facebook, you can view your content shares by looking through your notifications or looking at the post itself.
via swaygroup.com