Ensure your social media efforts don’t go in vain

Prior starting the actual topic, we want to ask you some questions! – What is the first thing you do when you wake up? If you want to have a conversation with a friend who is internationally situated – what would you do then? If you want to check a company’s environment – what will you do? You can start by thriving ways to measure your social media effort.

I am sure the first answer that appeared in your mind is – Facebook, WhatsApp, or any other social media channel. Social media is booming and so is social media marketing. Businesses are working hard to make people aware about their services through social media platform or paying thousands of bucks to a social media marketing agency. Hence, it is important to measure their social media performance and know where you lack.

Social media platform often offers a unique and challenging opportunity to engage and connect one-on-one with their potential customers, prospects and fans of your business. However, there are only 42% of owners that feel they are able to precisely measure the worth of their social media efforts.

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#GOAL

Efforts are done to achieve particular objective. So, initially identify your objective. Once you are done with that, just compare the current situation with your set goal. This will clarify about the effectiveness of your social media effort till now. For this, you can start by asking – how will your efforts impact your income and will it develop your business? You’ll want to put a measurable result in place along with a timeframe in which to achieve the goal. For instance, if you have kept and objective for 1000 reach per post and still you are able to find 500 reach per post, you need to identify what’s wrong.

#CompareCompetitorsEfforts

As discussed above, when you are planning your social media measurement strategy, you can begin by defining the goals you are looking to achieve. According to your success goals, you can set your key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring progress.

For instance, if your goal is to enhance brand awareness and improve the amount of traffic back to your brand’s website, then you should:

• Set targets on where your business is currently ranking on every social media platform.
• Make a competitive analysis of your business versus your competitors.

Along with these, you can even measure your social media marketing efforts through various tools. Few tools to assist you review your competitor’s social media efforts include:

• SimplyMeasured
• Socialbakers
• Facebook Insights

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You can even review your top competitor’s social media practices like overall followers, the frequency of their postings, and engagement of posts. Along with that, use a search or listening tool, to know the total number of mentions of your brand. Further, if you want to understand the source of your potential web traffic, use web tool like Google or Adobe’s SiteCatalyst. You can set different Bitly links created from Bit.ly to know, which platform is more active and give responses to your social media efforts.

#ReviewMarks

MARKS? Is that what you and I read about? Maybe you heard this word last in your school days. Recall those days back and implement the same strategy today in social media marketing. It is an easy yet effective strategy to use when you are working hard for your brand awareness. Say a smart way to gauge your efforts on Facebook, Twitter or any other well-known social channel.

Umm. Okay! But how does it work?

For instance if you are posting few pictures regarding your service or product on Facebook and are able to receive bunch of likes on it. The next day if you post something creative and you see more comments and shares on it. It happens right?

Well, according to my analysis likes show support and the precious positive comments convey more interest and at the same time-shares are more valuable as they move the update beyond your page. Prior to any campaign, convert your goals to a numeric value. Then you can use the following point system to weight different gestures on your post.

• Likes: 1 mark
• Comments: 5 marks
• Shares: 10 marks

At the end or during the campaign, a quick calculation of marks will help you to know if your efforts on various social media channels are capable of achieving the goal or not.

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