How do you measure your return on investment for your social media marketing? How much did you even invest in it? It’s not so cut-and-dry as a direct mail campaign, for example, and there’s no official way to figure it out. You can, however, pay attention to different clues that may signal your strategy is working. Here are five of them.
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Your Fans are Growing
Perhaps the easiest and most intuitive way to tell if your social media strategy is succeeding: are you getting more fans? Are more people liking you? Are more people following you? Be grateful for such a concrete number, because it’s one of the only truly quantifiable ways (that’s not a guess) to measure your success. Pay attention to things like the rate at which you’re earning new fans, and the number of “unlikes” or “unfollows” you receive over time as well.
You’re Talking to People
User engagement is so important, and that includes you. Hopefully you’re actively interacting with your fans and followers by answering questions, responding to feedback, and just joining in on the conversation in general. If you’re frequently posting new comments or responses, it means your users are regularly engaging with you, and that’s a good thing. If you seldom find an opportunity to comment back, you need to find ways to increase user engagement on your page.
You Meet Fans in Real Life
All those fans are great, but are they turning into customers? There are many different ways to try and determine that, but one way is seeing them in person. When you’re at your physical place of business, or you’re out and about meeting clients, for example, how often do people mention your social media? Do customers come into your store and say they heard about the sale on Facebook? Do your regulars tell you they like what you posted yesterday? Not everyone who follows you will discuss so in “real life,” but the more often they do, the more you know it’s working.
It’s Getting Easier
In the beginning, it can be really difficult to come up with great content on a constant basis. While it will always be challenging, it will also get a little easier as you get more practice. You’ll experiment with posts, and through trial and error you’ll find out what your fans respond to most positively. You’ll find out what doesn’t work; you’ll get a better sense of what people are looking for; and you’ll know what to say. It will get easier for you because you’ll be getting better at it and thus more successful in general.
Your Business is Growing
It can be tough to directly correlate things like sales and new client inquiries with your social media strategy. You likely have more marketing efforts going than just Facebook and Twitter, and you never can tell exactly the return social media is giving you. However, what if you crunch the numbers and realize that you’ve made more money since you launched your social media profiles? It just could be the result of a successful campaign.
This and many other educational articles helping web professionals understand the challenges of the web have been prepared for you by Alexander Bagnall thanks to SEOMap – the keyword strategy experts.
