Is Your Social Media Strategy Working? How Do You Know?
Posted by Brad Sauer on Thu, Aug 04, 2011
These days, it seems nobody does anything without considering their social media strategy. If you’re reading this blog, you are probably no exception. You have asked yourself how you can use social media to advance your business or cause. Maybe you’ve tried to build a network on Facebook , Twitter, and other social networking sites. Maybe you’ve tried the symbiotic strategy of networking with other bloggers.
But have you ever stopped to ask whether your approach is working? A social media strategy isn’t necessarily successful just because it generates lots of clicks. It's probably successful if it generates lots of interest. But how do you measure interest?
5 Ways to Measure Interest
Analyze the Numbers - Raw data is always a good starting point. If your social media strategy isn’t generating traffic or a following, it’s probably not generating interest. If it’s only generating traffic from certain sources, you’re probably missing out on a potential growth area.
Although there are many products available to help you track your online marketing, Google Analytics offers diverse functionality and integration. You can find out which of your social media networks is bringing the most traffic to your site, and pinpoint certain approaches on specific networks which correspond to a noticeable increase in traffic.
There are a few key metrics involved with measuring social media marketing success. But, numbers don’t always tell the whole story. As Sarah Hofstetter, senior vice president of emerging media and brand strategy at 360i says, "Albert Einstein once said, 'Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted'. There are tons of data in social media — and in digital in general — and it’s up to us to make sure that what we’re counting is aligned with solving the business challenge."
Hold a Focus Group - Find ten people who are unfamiliar with your site and ask them for an hour or two of their time. (If you have a little money in your budget, you can solicit participants on Craigslist for a relatively small hourly rate.) Point them to your social media and set them loose. Ask them what caught their attention and what bored them. If anything caught their attention, ask them how long your social media and (hopefully) your site kept their interest. Then ask them to suggest improvements, and implement the improvements which make the most sense.
Poll Your Customers - If you’re selling a product, your social media strategy should be to generate interest, which will hopefully generate sales. However, you may be generating plenty of interest, but failing to translate that interest into sales. If so, your social media is probably targeting the wrong audience.
By polling your customers at or after checkout, you can get a sense of how they heard about you. The results will tell you whether or not your social media strategy is making a difference in your bottom line. Some sophisticated analytics programs will be able to partially accomplish this task, as well.
Find Out Who’s Talking About You - Google yourself. Hopefully the first hit is your website. (If not, you’ve got problems other than your social media strategy.) The next few sites might be directly related to your own social media efforts. But after that, you will hopefully find that there are people on the web who are talking about you.
The number of people talking about you is important, but so is the quality of the people talking about you. Bloggers both make trends and follow them. If a well-read, highly respected blog is talking about you, your social media strategy is probably successful.
Take a Few Days Off - A successful social media strategy is supposed to work a little like a pyramid scheme; you tell 100 people about your site, they each tell a few people, who each tell a few people, and so on. You certainly shouldn’t take time off at the early stages of implementing your social media strategy. But once you’re starting to get people’s attention, take a vacation for a few days and check your before and after numbers.
Have the numbers improved, or did they decrease without your constant attention? If they increased (even at a slower rate), you know your strategy is working. If not, you may need to try something new. (Don’t let the relaxation lull you into complacency, though!)
For more thoughts on measuring the success of your online marketing strategy, see this post on econsultancy.com. Even though more than two years old, the content is still very relevant, and the readers' comments are insightful as well. And remember: a successful social media strategy generates interest from the right types of people. Don’t let your analysis begin and end with the numbers!