One of the many misconceptions about social media marketing is that it’s very expensive to communicate and engage with your target audience online to get good social media ROI. Online, you can find many social media channels and 3rd party applications that you can use to monitor (listen) to the conversation on the social web and to analyze where your target audience spends their time online. Many of these services ranges from free to very expensive depending on your digital needs. Many of these services claims to have the best solution for your social media needs, but in truth, there’s no magic push button to make social media engagement easier.
If you are interested to get a good ROI from social media, you have to put in the effort and time, to truly understand how you can reach your objectives with social media. There’s no “one way” to be successful on the social web and try to experiment with new ways to measure your success. Learn what you are doing wrong and optimize your strategy on a consistent basis.
Aligning social media with your objectives
With social media, it’s very important that you align your strategy and your engagement on the social web with your business objectives. Not only do you need to do some research on which social media channels you are going to use, but also how you are going to use those channels. Are you going to use your business voice and tone when engaging on these channels or are you going to define a more relaxed casual tone that you are going to use to engage via social media?
It really doesn’t matter if you are only going to curate content to share with your target audience or if you are going to create content, it’s very important that you understand your audience on how they are going to react to what you share with them. There are many ways you can determine this and the easiest method is if you create your own content is to check your blog for which blog posts received the most comments, views, and shares.
There are also many other 3rd party tools you can use to analyze how many people are actually interacting and engaging with your content over a period of time. These tools are very helpful because it can make you understand what content your target audience values the most.
Track social media traffic with Google analytics
Google Analytics is a great tool and it’s free that you can use to track visitors to your website and blog. It’s also useful to know from which social media channels they came. Here’s a couple of tips you can use with Google Analytics to identify which social media channels are driving traffic to your website or blog.
- Source: Google tracks every referral coming to your website and blog. Make a list (export) this data and start segmenting the amount of social media traffic against organic and paid traffic (PPC).
- Segment your data: With your list of social media channels driving traffic to your web site, start segmenting the data even further. Which content on which social media channel got the most response?
Once you start segmenting the data to analyze social media, you will be able to clearly determine how much influence which social media channels drives traffic to your website. Doing it this way will help you analyze which social media channels are the most valuable for your audience to invest your time and effort in to communicate directly with them.
Hello Anton. I spoke to Byron a few days ago and told him when we opened a platform we work on on Monday, the Edgerank was 0. I was shocked, but when it comes to SM management, we took the last (working) week of December and just took every we learned got us results and built what we call a ‘flowchart’. Basically, it’s a Excel doc with tick boxes o
f things to do each day, what are the details on which platform. And I’ll tell you, we went from Zero Edgerank to 19 in a day and got our performance back to the momentum where we ended last year in 2-3 days. I’m happy we did that.
I read your opening paragraph and said to myself: ‘Here we go’… as social media contracts are pretty expensive, and there’s a reason for that. Because it’s a science, there are tweaks need everyday. You need to have your finger on the pulse of the platform. On our biggest contract, we have 2-3 people working on the entire online platform every day. And that’s not to say anything of the cost of the software, reports etc.
It Is expensive, if you want to do it right and get real results.I found your tips at the end very useful and I’m going to see how I can segment my metrics even more and work on those things that work.
Thanks Ivin. I’m glad it helped you. Where are you based so that we can grab a coffee sometime?
I’m up the R21 in Bonearo Park, Kempton Park. You’re in Pretoria, right? Where in Pta are you?
Pretoria East. We can maybe meet somewhere halfway. Next week or the week after that.
Yep. Next week I’m on a much deserved holiday 🙂 Week after would be great. How does Centurion sound for halfway?
Perfect. Let’s arrange it closer to the time.