Research shows that less than 30% of marketers know how to measure their social media efforts. Without the ability to measure your return on investment (ROI), there’s no way to know how to make social media platforms work for you.
Since there are 4.74 billion social media users, it’s important to make sure you’re reaching these potential customers effectively. Understanding and using the social media tracking tools available is an important step in getting the most out of your social media efforts.
These tracking tools help you make important decisions about your marketing strategies. How can tracking tools help you? There are five areas that social media tracking helps you increase your business.
How Social Media Tracking Helps You Measure Success
81% of small and medium-sized businesses currently use social media as part of their marketing strategy. Without a plan in place to measure these attempts though, this interaction means nothing.
By utilizing tools on the different social media platforms, or using tools such as Google Analytics, you can make sure your social media efforts are reaching the right people in the right way.
Help Create Effective Campaigns
One way these tracking tools can help you measure social media success is by helping you see how your social media campaigns perform. When you create content to share on social media, you need to know what content proves most effective.
Tracking tools help you see what content gets the most response so you get the most out of your efforts. You can see
- Which campaigns are working best.
- What content gets the most response.
- Which demographics are responding most with your content.
Understanding these factors will help you create more compelling content. This will also help you determine where your leads come from and how to better reach your target demographic.
Part of creating effective content is understanding who will respond to the content. If you use tracking tools you can tailor your campaigns to reach the audience you need to reach.
This will also help you see when certain content is losing steam so you can rotate accordingly. It’s important to make sure your content stays relevant to social media users to get the best interaction.
Determine Which Platforms Work Best
To reach your target demographic, you first have to know where to find them. By using social media tracking tools, you can determine what content works best for each social media platform.
Understanding how different content performs on each platform will help you determine which platforms to give the most attention to. Just because a platform is popular doesn’t mean it’s the right platform for you.
For example, 68% of social media users are on Facebook. Facebook is more about personal interaction though. If your brand is geared towards other businesses you’ll likely have more results from a platform like LinkedIn than Facebook.
Utilizing tracking information will also help you determine how often and at what times you should post content for the platforms you use. This helps to ensure you’re reaching more of your audience effectively.
Know Who’s Interacting With Your Brand
part of a successful social media campaign is creating customer loyalty. By using tracking tools, you can find out which customers are interacting with your content. You can also find out who’s talking about your brand.
If you know who your loyal fans are, you can create campaigns to reward these loyal followers. This helps you create more brand loyalty and keeps your customers talking about you.
Creating loyalty campaigns can also help you reach new followers. People like to feel appreciated and they will share their experiences with others. If people see that you appreciate current customers, they’ll want to give you their loyalty as well.
This can also help you determine what’s most important to your followers. This way you make sure you’re keeping them around by addressing their concerns and interests.
Differentiate Between Real and Fake Traffic
There are plenty of bots and scammers out there that can skew your traffic results. With the proper tracking tools in place, you can determine where your real traffic comes from.
Tracking tools can tell you how many clicks, likes and shares your content receives. If you rely solely on how many people see your content, this doesn’t give you a clear idea of the response to your campaigns.
Tracking tools also show you where these interactions come from. This will help you see if any of the interactions are inflated and determine the true interactions.
Help Create Realistic Goals
If you want to grow your business, you need a way to set realistic goals. Using social media tracking helps you see
- How many followers you have
- Who those followers are
- What content interests them most
- How often people interact with you
Understanding the effect your content has will help you create new growth goals that you can reach. By seeing the growth you already have you can better understand how to create more organic growth moving forward.
Knowing how your campaigns are doing also helps you create new goals. Sometimes goals need to change based on what’s already working for you.
If you see a campaign is working on one platform, you may want to see if you can recreate that success on another platform. If you see that a certain platform isn’t working out, you can make decisions about changing your strategy or letting go of that platform.
How to Measure Social Media Success
To get started measuring your social media success, you first need to understand what tracking tools are available to you. You also need to understand what information they provide.
Each social media platform provides analytics tools to help you track your progress. These tools will show you information such as
- How many people have seen each post
- How many people have interacted with the post
- How many likes you have
- How many shares each post has received
- When your posts have the most interaction
Each platform shares this information in a different way, so it’s important to get yourself familiar with the set-up of each platform’s analytics tools. These tools will help you see which posts are most popular.
These analytics will also help you see the demographics for who interacts with individual posts. This will help you tailor content.
This tracking information will also help you see how many people click through to your website. This will help you see how many leads you get from content.
Using Google Analytics
Chances are you’ll want a little more detailed information about your social media efforts. By setting up Google Analytics for your website, you can get a better idea of how effective your social media campaigns are to sending leads to your website.
Google Analytics helps you get a better idea of where you’re getting your website traffic from. This will better help you determine which social media platforms are working for you.
This analytics tool will also help you track which pages, posts and media are getting the most interaction on your website. This will help you determine what to share in your social media campaigns. This will also help you see which campaigns are already working for you so you can more effectively drive traffic to your site.
How to Use this Tracking Information
To get the most out of your tracking efforts, you need to know what you’re tracking. Determine what’s most important to you.
Do you want to know how much traffic you get? Do you need to know your conversion rate? Do you want to understand how much interaction you receive in general?
Understanding what’s most important to your business goals will help you track the right information. It’s important to create clear goals for your social media campaigns to get the most out of your tracking efforts.
Make sure you check your results regularly. It’s best if you set time once a week to check your results so you can make any necessary changes to your social media campaigns.
You also need a willingness to change goals as necessary. Watch the trends around your campaigns so you can readjust your efforts. Sometimes things work differently than you expect and you need to prepare for this.
Re-evaluate your goals regularly. A good rule of thumb is to do a monthly evaluation of your social media goals.
Look at what’s working and what’s not. Determine how you can use the most popular material to create new campaigns. Do not be afraid to change the game-plan.
Creating Successful Social Media Campaigns
Social media tracking is just one aspect of your strategy. To create successful social media campaigns you need to understand how to use this information to create an overall strategy. A successful social media strategy should fit in well with your overall marketing strategy.
If you’re not sure where to start, there are options available. For help with your social media or digital marketing strategy, contact us to see if our solutions could help your business.
