Measuring success in social media

VIEW TRANSCIPT Tracking the impact of a social media campaign is really important, but it can get complicated. That’s when analytics and tools can help. In this video we’ll cover how analytics and different tools can help you track the impact of your social media efforts and understand your customers a bit better. Let’s assume our vintage clothing business has established accounts on a few social networks - Facebook, Twitter, and maybe even some smaller, fashion-related social networks. First, it’s important to take a look at the social networks themselves. When you log in, many provide data about what’s happening on those networks. For example, you might be able to get reports about how many people you’re connected with and how that’s been trending over time, which of your posts are getting shared or interacted with the most, or even who your biggest fans might be. By looking at the data and reports available in many social networks, you can learn a lot about who your connections are, how they behave, and how they consume or interact with the content you’re providing. But logging into every single network and looking at the data and reports in each one separately can be time-consuming and tricky. Remember those tools that can help you schedule your posts and consolidate all of your logging in to just one place? Well, many of those tools can also track and provide data that can compare the different networks against each other, and give you all that reporting in one place. Tools like these are really helpful, and you can investigate them by searching for 'social media management tools'. There’s also another kind of tool that might help you: social media monitoring. There are lots of them out there and a wide range of features and pricing, but basically, these tools will scour all the social networks out there looking for mentions of you, your competitors, or even certain themes being talked about. These can help you identify new social networks you might want to participate in, and let you join conversations about your business or your industry. But these reports and tools typically only measure what’s happening on the social networks themselves. So if you want to know what’s happening after someone decides to click on a link you shared, or a piece of content you posted and ends up on your website? For this, you’ll need a separate tool dedicated to tracking what’s happening on websites, like Google Analytics. Web analytics tools will generally pick up the trail as soon as someone hits your website, and many of them will automatically track when visitors are coming from social media sites. That means that if you’re tracking what people are doing on your website, you can see how many visitors from Facebook or Twitter are not just arriving on your website, but also submitting your contact form, buying items from your online store, or downloading your monthly PDF newsletter. Now you’ll really be able to see how your social media efforts are paying off! Lots of web analytics tools also let you track not just what network visitors are coming from, but even the specific posts or pieces of content that got them to visit your website. Each web analytics tool does this differently, but the end result is pretty cool: You’ll be able to look at different reports and see things like which kinds of content from which networks tend to get people to visit your website, engage further with your pages, and eventually convert on your business goals! So that covers how to measure the success of your social media efforts. Using the data and tools available from the social networks themselves, using social media management and monitoring tools, and using web analytics to see what social visitors are doing on your website will help you understand exactly how and where your efforts are paying off. That way you can keep improving your social media strategy.