By now you know your business needs to get involved with this wild and crazy thing they call social media. You've forged a Facebook page, tinkered with tweets, and lit up LinkedIn, but is it actually working? How do you know if that latest photo of grumpy cat you shared resonated with your audience?
It All Starts With A Goal
You might be using social media to build brand awareness, it may be a way to generate leads, regardless of your reasoning for being on your favorite social network identifying and tracking your successes will only be achieved if you have a goal set for your social media efforts.
All too often businesses get involved with a social network simply to keep up with the Jones's, but they in no way align those efforts with their business goals.
In order to identify and track your social media successes you are going to need to establish goals and understand what actions from users matter most to what it is you are trying to achieve.
Tracking Your Progress
Once you've identified your goals you can now analyze your work moving forward. Some things to focus on include:
- The number of goals achieved
- The type of content helping achieve those goals
- The network driving these goals
By starting with these few focal points you can start to better understand what resonates with your audience and where it resonates with them most. Look for commonalities and trends in the data that can help you to better identify wins.
What's Working For You
Once you have some data to analyze you can start to identify what's working and what isn't. For instance if you've run a coupon code promotion two months in a row and the first month you simply posted an all text post on Facebook that included the code and the next month you posted an image with the code and you saw a greater use rate the second month its possible that the image is something that appeals to your audience more and is worth replicating in the future.
Adversely the opposite may have been true for Twitter. If you ran campaigns parallel to each other using the same technique the text may have resonated better with Twitter users than the image. Its things like this that its important to be aware of and adapt to.
Once you've identified what's resonating most with your audience you can try and duplicate it or build upon it moving forward. The key is to learn from what is or isn't happening with your audience and adapt. Most of all remember a real win is one that helps to accomplish the goals set forth by your efforts.
If you liked this post, you might also enjoy Social Stats: Stop Paying Attention to Locker-room Metrics by Kristy Bolsinger
