The Social Media Marketer

Are You Tracking Your Social Media Marketing Results?

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Social media metrics measure the success of your social media campaigns. Before you launch your campaign, the first thing you need to do is decide what your goal is. Are you trying to increase traffic to your site? Get more newsletter subscribers? Get more visitors to download your ebooks? Or, are you simply trying to get the word out about your brand? Either way, you have to have a plan in place.

Once you launch your campaign, you need to monitor your social media metrics. This helps you understand the value of each individual media and how it may helping your business accomplish your social media marketing goals. There are currently three common social media metrics that marketers measure:

1. Visitors and where the traffic is coming from
2. Network size (followers, fans, members)
3. Amount of comments left

These common social media metrics give your company a good idea of how popular your brand is in the social media world. But, they don't measure the most important thing: How many of these people were turned into paying customers due to your social media campaign? That's why it is also important to dig deeper and measure other areas of your campaign as well. Here are ten other important social media metrics you should be measuring:

1. Social Media Leads – Use a software or online program that measures your web traffic. This will tell you what sites your leads are being generated from.
2. Engagement Time – Many companies believe heavily in interactive engagement for their online visitors. These businesses are more interested in how long they were able to keep their visitors engaged. How much time are they spending on your interactive Facebook application? How long are the ones visiting your site, as a result of a social media link, staying engaged on your site? And, which site pages are keeping them engaged the longest?
3. Bouncing Rate – When your visitors come to your site from a social media site, do they leave immediately? This is an important social media metrics to measure. This is when you need to make some changes to your site itself. Is there relevant content on your landing page? Does your site navigation make it too hard for them to find the information they're looking for?
4. Amount of Memberships and Active Networkers – Are your social media networks getting larger over time? Do your social media network members actively interact with your online content? If not, your campaign needs to be re-examined, and changes need to be made to create enticing content that keeps your members interested.
5. Activity – You should chart comparisons of active members vs total members. Start an online campaign that promotes interactive activities, like social applications. Then, measure how many inactive members become active ones.
6. Conversions – The number one goal of your social media marketing campaign is to convert your members. You may want to convert them into paying customers, newsletter subscribers, application users, ebook downloads, etc... Your social media metrics will help you analyze how well your conversions are going for you due to social media.
7. Brand Recognition – You need to measure mentions of your brand within your social media networks. Track both negative and positive comments with your social media metrics.
8. Loyalty – Are your network members coming back to your network pages? Are they sharing and re-sharing your content? If so, how many and how frequently?
9. Viral Sharing – When your network members share your content, are their network members re-sharing it? This is important to measure because re-shares get your brand more recognition than it would get from just your own network members.
10. Blogging Interaction – The only way to use social media metrics for your blogs is for your company to allow interaction. That means allowing visitors to post comments to your blog posts and responding to their comments. You should make sure your blog has widgets that allow visitors to easily share your content on their social networks. Then, you can easily track referrals to your blog and what social media sites they came from.

As social media becomes more popular, many businesses are using it to their advantage. Social media provides a interactive way for businesses to communicate with their potential customers. That's why it's important for companies to find a way to monitor their social media metrics. This is the only way for them to know what strategies are actually turning their online visitors into online customers.