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Can you really measure social media ROI? You have an excellent team of social media marketers and copywriters. You know they blog and post regularly on channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others. But, how do you know if the effort is really paying off? Can you track social KPIs to see trend charts that coincide with your business growth?
Most businesses new to social media ask these questions during their one-to-one meetings with social media experts.
To answer the first question: Yes, social analytics tools can significantly increase ROI of a business. Second, social KPIs are completely measurable and can be significantly improved with time. But, how do you know which social KPIs you need to measure, and in what ways can you track them?
The bottom line is that you need social analytics to produce favorable business results without brainstorming over data reorganization.
There are a number of ways you can measure social KPIs to keep improving your content marketing strategy. Here, you will learn how to track analytics data and use it to improve social KPIs.
Make Use of Built-in Analytics
Today, most of the popular social platforms come with built-in analytics sections, for example, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, YouTube Analytics, Pinterest Analytics, LinkedIn Insights and more. The statistics available from these tools are free to use.
Just log into the analytics section of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest, derive the metrics in a spreadsheet format and keep on monitoring the trend chart. You can also prepare customized reports by re-analyzing the available data in the various business formats and work towards the betterment of factors that are non-performing.
Invest Time in Social Analytics Tools
Popular social media analytics tools can also work wonders. In fact, they make your social KPI monitoring job much easier when you do it using built-in analytics. For example, quintly, a professional social media analytics tool, provides more than 250 built-in metrics from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest — all in a single platform. You can create custom dashboards to set specific social media goals for a week or a month and then track them across all the networks.
Hootsuite is another wonderful tool that helps you track engagement and conversions using insights from popular social networks. Below is a screenshot showing analytics modules from Hootsuite.
There are a few KPIs for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn that you can monitor to improve results. There is more you can do with social analytics tools.
- Fan metrics of page – Helps you optimize page components against competition.
- Content analysis – Helps you analyze content, its response rate, and engagement score.
- Interaction analysis – Helps you understand user feedback and strategize marketing effort accordingly.
- Key Interacting Users – Helps you identify potential users, even from competitor pages and build relationship with them.
- Followers Profiling – Helps you analyze the rate of change in Followers and Following count and decide on action points.
- Tweet Analysis – Helps you develop content strategy to maintain and grow your audience and then increase conversion rate.
- Interaction Analytics – Helps you measure user response by the count of retweets, replies, mentions and favorites.
- Company Followers – Helps you know the follower development in a page and decide on the necessary actions to increase the number.
- Status Updates – Helps you identify the time, day and distribution types that work well and then replicate the winning strategies.
- Interactions – Helps you analyze what type of content creates most number of interactions and how to use the data for improving response rate of content.
You can track similar types of social KPIs for YouTube, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram and other popular tools and determine areas of further improvements. The more you work on the continuous feedbacks generated by the analytics tools, the better.
Competitive benchmarking is another interesting feature that allows you to compare your page performance with that of competitors and helps you identify the right social KPIs that need further improvement.
Use Google Analytics to Your Benefit
Google Analytics is undoubtedly a robust tool for analyzing social media data. You can examine different statistics from the Social Network section of GA to produce a multitude of reports and then analyze them one by one. Of course, as a social media marketer, you don’t need to work on every piece of data but be specific to the most important KPIs as follows:
# of Sessions — The statistics explain how popular your business is on social media while comparing to other sources of website traffic. You can also see the number of social networks driving traffic to your site. Working on this data enhances your presence in new social sites as well as improves content syndication strategies to increase overall traffic count.
# of New Users — The data shows the number of new people coming to your website through social activities. The more interactive threads you post on a regular basis, and the more you engage in active networking with your friends and followers — the higher the number.
Bounce Rate — Shows if the posts you are making on social media are right in terms of their relevancy with landing pages. Lower bounce rate ensures that your message truly complements the landing page content and vice versa.
Pages/ Session — Tells you how interesting, informative and interactive your other website pages are to your social audience.
Average Session Duration — Determines how attentive your social audience is to your website. A low count may indicate poor performance of your landing pages or influx of irrelevant social visitors. In Google analytics, you can select ‘Landing Page’ as a secondary dimension and identify the pages facing low average session duration issues.
Conclusion
A social media marketer can use all the above metrics and social KPIs to sharpen inbound marketing tactics. The whole objective is to:
- Identify key social performance areas using tools.
- Analyze what strategies work, which do not and why.
- Repeat winning tactics and deal with weaknesses.
- Monitor growth or failure rates upon strategy implementation.
- Rework the areas that need utmost attention and keep on improving social KPIs.
- Be aware of any change (positive or negative) happening around your business due to changes adopted in your social marketing initiatives.
Hopefully, this will help you implement a better social media strategy and a favorable outcome for your business. What experience have you had when using social analytics tools?
[“source-smallbiztrends”]