One of the most common question and one that has been ranked the most frequent question by the Social Media Examiner report is: "How can I measure the effect of social media marketing on my business?" Does the amount of followers or friends that you have really help in determining the success of you social media campaign? Or should you start sending out a poll asking your visitors and other leads how they found out about your business or company?
If you are running a campaign on the social media platform, then you probably want to get the best results as you can. In most cases, social media campaigns are intended to strengthen and increase the awareness of your business, company or brand. One of the appealing things about social media is that as a digital campaign, it is possible for you to measure the metrics and evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign.
Here are some easy ways that you can implement to measure the success and effectiveness of your campaigns.
The exposure and reach of your brand:
Measuring the number of potential viewers or brand reach of your social media campaign is not as rudimental as tracking the number of your Twitter followers and Facebook fans. If you want to better the account for duplicate users, it is important that you shift your focus from raw numbers to the percentage growth rate. It is important that you compare the like with like through measurement of metrics over a certain stretch of time; i.e. weekly, monthly or quarterly.
For instance, with Twitter, the total potential reach over a month is made up of the followers and specifically those who retweet your message. Comparing these figures with the previous monthly totals will allow you track the growth and effect of your campaigns.
For Facebook, your interest would be to record the number of fans you have for your page. Additionally, record the number of friends that every user who; has become a fan in the last month, commented on your posts and liked the post during that month.
On YouTube, track the views on your channel, subscriber numbers and video bounce rates in a month and on your Blog, look at the visitors' number to your posts over a month. Lastly, do not forget to look at metrics that are not tied to social media.
*Tools to use: TweetReach and Facebook Insights.
Real-Time Alerts:
Google Analytics Alerts, just like Google Alerts, is very useful in running a campaign as it can aid you stays up-to-date with the success of your brand promotion. This is always significant if you are working for an agency running several promotions at a go. It is also useful for small businesses that don't have the time to check their accounts every day.
Experts advise that, Google Analytics can be a handy tool in monitoring the crazy traffic spikes from the social media platforms. Set up an alert for tremendous increase in daily traffic from Facebook, Twitter and Google+ from Alerts and get updates through your email for increased traffic.
Engagement Measurement:
You can easily evaluate the appeal and the interest of your marketing efforts on the social media platform by measuring the number of users who engage and interact with your promotional messages.
For Facebook - measure the number of clicks that your links receive, the number of times your message is liked and the number of times your messages receive comments.
Twitter - measure the number of your hashtags included in tweets, number of re-tweets, the number of clicks your link receives in total and the number of users engaging in your activity.
Blog - measures the number of subscribers you have and the amount of posts shared and comments.
YouTube - the amount of new subscribers and the amount and type of the ratings, both negative and positive and the number of comments should all be measured.
Conversion Measurement:
You might be tempted to jump into measuring conversations and investment returns straightaway. However, without the analysis of the previous metrics you will miss out on very crucial data that carries useful information on what and why your ROI is so.
There are several methods for tracking conversations from your social media marketing strategies, but Google Analytics is one of the most commonly used tools. Google Analytics helps in tracking user activity on the website on a real-time basis.
Author Bio:
This article is contributed by Cally Greene, she is a blogger and works with JoeyGilbertLaw– Domestic Violence Attorney Reno. She also loves to write about online strategies that are related to Social Media, Online Marketing and Legal issues. You can follow her on Google+.
image credit: volusion. infographic by wildfire.