Quantifying your social media efforts is a crucial step in determining the effectiveness of social media marketing. Although getting hundreds or thousands of likes on a social media post can be exciting, it is important to recognize that likes do not necessarily equate to sales.
Many business owners and their social media marketing managers struggle with the constant tug-of-war between spending hours of time on their business’s social media or abandoning it altogether. Therefore, having a firm method of quantifying social media efforts is crucial. In this post, we will discuss some important tips that will help you better quantify your social media efforts and point you in a direction of success!
Tip #1 – Define Your Goal
The first step in better quantifying your social media success is to define your goal. Are you on social media to generate sales directly or because you feel like you need to be where your customers are? If you are actively trying to make sales through social media, your posts should either generate a sale or produce a result that you track, such as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Every effort you make on social media should be in support of making a sale. You should avoid posting things that actively hurt your chances of making a sale or suppress your future post reach.
Tip #2 – Define Success
Once you have defined your goal for being on social media, you need to define what success looks like. For a sales-driven approach, obviously a sale would be the ultimate success. However, there are other things you can track to keep your social media content moving in the right direction. For example, an important KPI for e-commerce stores could be “add to cart”. They may find that certain social media content generates a lot of users shopping on their store site and adding items to their carts. While that didn’t generate a sale, that social media post got a customer closer to the sale. Having a well-defined set of KPIs will help you determine what is working and what isn’t working in your marketing efforts.
Tip #3 – Focus on Quality Over Quantity
Tracking social media efforts purely based on reach, likes, or shares can be very damaging to your efforts. There’s little point in having social media posts getting thousands of likes and shares from people who would never buy your product or contract your services. Therefore, it is crucial to focus on quality over quantity. We’ve had clients that have generated sales through social media without a single like on a post!
Don’t Give Up!
We’ve seen that there’s a tendency to want to give up when businesses are not seeing any results. Rest assured that you’re not alone in this! We have consulted numerous businesses and organizations on their social media efforts and have help them reorient their goals and their strategy to bring real success online. And a recent post, we talked about how your website SEO efforts are so foundational to your online marketing efforts. There’s a possibility that what you were trying to get out of your social media efforts is what you actually should be trying to get out of your website. Let a social media expert like McNair Media take a look at your social media strategy and give you meaningful feedback and next steps.
