Time for a rant. I am asked frequently how to get more followers or likes. The truth is there is no magic answer to this. 100 followers or 10,000 fans, if no one is engaged, then there is your ROI out the window! It is useful to measure numbers and compare these to competitors but please don’t make it all you base your social media efforts on.
Today, my post is about measurement, and the numbers you should be measuring! I have made this applicable for small business owners and entrepreneurs on a shoe string budget too!
Here are my 4 things to start measuring and what you can learn from these (and the FREE tools you can use to do so!)
Online Mentions
Yes, where is your brand mentioned online? You want to make sure you are tracking every single mention and responding to any which are appropriate. This seems obvious but KNOW many of you aren’t doing this.
The obvious free tool is Google Alerts – simply sign up for free enter your keyword/s and you will get email alerts every time something new is published online! Set up alerts for your company name, your products, your competitors and your industry.
***Top Tip*** keeping track of your competitors’ online activity can help you maintain a competitive advantage and might also alert you to websites/communities you are missing.***
Sentiment
Sentiment refers to the perceptions and tone in which your brand is mentioned. If you invest in a good social media monitoring tool like Radian 6 this will help you measure negative, positive and neutral conversations online surrounding your brand. Socialmention - perhaps one of the most useful free social search and reporting tools with a sentiment feature, why not explore it today.
***Top Tip***Why not monitor your sentiment for a month, if sentiment is particularly poor then an objective can be to respond to negative mentions appropriately. Or perhaps you might find poor feedback surrounding a particular product and this can inform your marketing team when they are planning future activity.
What you learn from this activity is how people already feel about your company or brand. It is good to note that sentiment only really gets exciting for the bigger brands, if you are a local business I am afraid you probably won’t see as many results for sentiment (unless you have a really big profile of course!).
Reach
Just how far is your message going? If one person retweets a piece of content on Twitter this goes out to their follower base and so on. It amplifies your message, a tweet to 300 followers could have massive reach depending on the influence of those who engage with your conversation.
A tool I have been using is Crowdbooster, one of the analytics features shows you the reach of your individual tweets. Last week I learnt that a social media ‘tip’ I tweeted was retweeted 4 times and had reach of almost 6000 users. Where as some of my ‘TV tweets had no influence at all.
What you can learn from analysing reach in this way, is what kind of content excites and stimulates your audience and you can include more of this in your social media activity! Facebook now gives you this information on page posts and also on the insights tab – though you need to do some excel manipulation to see the real data so let me know if I can help.
Traffic
Content and social media is a form of inbound marketing, a technique to drive leads and traffic back to your site. Your site is where you convert (usually!).
The easiest way to monitor traffic coming in from social media activity is using Google Analytics, if you are not web savvy ask your web master or marketing agency to set this up for you and give you a log in. I encourage all marketers and business owners to at the very least learn how to navigate your way around analytics so you can understand what the data is showing you. Within Google analytics you can view social referrals by looking in the referrals tab or specifically in the social tab.
This video will give you a quick overview:
If you want to have a chat about improving
your social media measurement drop me a note! Please share some of your experiences with measurement tools.
