elaineSocial media strategies are more than just posting on Facebook sporadically, or sending out a tweet every minute. It does not matter whether you post a hundred times or just once a day, if 1. The content you are posting is irrelevant to your target audience and 2. You are not tracking the results of your efforts.
We’ve always known that in the world of social media, content is still king. Aside from promoting your products and services to the market, the goal, and at the same time the benefit which can be derived from a successful online marketing strategy is creating a community. This starts with posting the right content that will interest visitors of your page. It takes time for a relationship to grow between the brand and its social media followers. This is why executing a social media campaign should be seamless, because a wrong move could lose you followers, and potential customers and brand evangelists.
The other side of a social media campaign is the tracking of KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators. Tracking KPI’s gives you insight as to how your brand is performing on social media. There are many types of KPI’s that can be tracked, depending on what behavior you are trying to measure. For instance, Facebook has a built-in analytics tool that measures the basic KPI’s for posts i.e. reach, engagement, number of likes.
According to an article on Social Media Today, different success factors are measured by different indicators.
If you want measure brand awareness, you could look at reach, and exposure. Who’s receiving your message and how far is it spreading?
If you want brand engagement, keep track of the retweets, comments, replies, shares, and likes. These answer questions such as how often are people participating or talking about your post.
If you want more traffic to your official website, look at URL shares, clicks and conversions.
And of course, don’t forget to track how your competitions’ own social media strategies are doing. It will give you insight into what’s going on in the industry your business is in.
For industries that rely heavily on the loyalty of its customers, tracking social media KPIs is essential to know which kind of content your market is interested in. You can optimize the content which you will be putting out in the future, and tailor it to fit your subscriber base’s needs and demands, when you are able to measure the engagement rates of your links. This is the only way to know what gets them interested. It cannot be a guessing game.
Also, understanding demographics helps you make important decisions when it comes to using social media to market your brand. For instance, if you know that most of your followers are based in a certain country or continent, then you would be posting content on their schedule, depending on what time it is in their area that they use the Internet more.
In order to have more followers and hopefully more customers, companies need to increase the recognition surrounding their business or brands. They should monitor social KPIs that are measuring Fan engagement, growth, activity, and demographics to understand the best tactics for connecting with their current followers and attracting new ones.