Does your marketing campaign include using social media to reach out and connect with customers? If the answer is no then you may want to set your flux capacitor to 2012 sign up for Facebook. Believe it or not some webmasters are still not using social media to get new customers and grow their business. Even if you are using social media the question becomes are you using it to its fullest potential. One really powerful way to succeed with social media is to use analytics to track patterns and customer responses to various marketing strategies. Let’s take a look at how analytics can help your social media because believe me when I say most webmasters do not track basic social media data.
What are Analytics
First we need to be on the same page as too what exactly web analytics is and how webmasters utilize the numbers they look at. Web analytics is a the process of collecting and analyzing the data from a particular web page and then optimizing the content to get better outcomes. It is more than simply looking at web traffic which is important. It can be a powerful market research tool that can track not only visitors but also track conversions, sources, visit time and more when used appropriately by you, the savvy webmaster. This will help you understand your market and increase your success.
Social Media Channels
The big advantage of tracking visitors from your social media outreach campaigns is learning what boomed and what busted. You may be a very talented and creative webmaster or content developer but every post you make on Facebook will not be gold. Tracking your social media is more than simply looking at Facebook likes, YouTube views, or retweets. Tracking social media means following the customer from Facebook, YouTube, or twitter and monitoring if they proceeded to your end game. Most companies use social media as bait to land the big one. The bite may be a product sale, website registration, or a phone call to your sales department.
How to Measure Social Media Analytics
Some may argue that social media cannot be measured in a significant way. I would argue that if you create social media goals that allow you to track the progress of your social media outreach then you can track the analytics. Look at the objective of your website and make goals to fit those objectives. If you have an e-commerce platform or want visitors to sign up on an email list or contact form then you will want to look for the conversion of web visitors. Check out your conversion reports and see which visitors are referred from social media sources. Optimize your tools and create a manual method for tracking what the software misses.
Do the Work
Only a small percentage of companies measure the ROI from social media even though most companies will agree that ROI is a valuable tool for measures success. Most companies also place a large amount of time creating and promoting their products and services on social media. So with a little extra effort why not just combine the two. Continue running your social media and make sure you focus on tracking your progress. Tracking fans, shares, likes, and comments all can be done manually and is very important research data. Tracking conversions with other tools can lead to powerful RIO number which can grown your social campaigns as well as your business.
