Any company that’s serious about maintaining a strong online presence has to have active social media pages. Indeed, given the current business landscape, it’s practically irresponsible to ignore the opportunities social media presents to both grow and consolidate your customer base. However, just because a business owner takes their social media efforts seriously, that doesn’t mean they’re implementing strategies efficiently or effectively. The good news is, whether you’ve been on social media platforms for ten years or ten minutes, there are ways you can better evaluate your social media performance –– and track leads more thoroughly than you have in the past. Here are the four social media metrics that matter most in business:
Schedule-Volume Overlap
Most businesses have a fairly set schedule for when they post on social media. (This makes sense for several reasons –– not just data collection.) And that’s a good thing, because the more regimented you are in your posting habits, the more precise information you can extract from social media data. The first way to get a handle on your social media performance is cross-referencing your posts with your page’s volume. In other words: when you look at your page’s volume, that is, the number of people talking about your brand, make sure also to compare its activity against your posting schedule. Chances are you’ll be able to identify posts that resonated with your audience in this way. After all, if your volume spiked sharply after you shared a quality blog post to your social media page, it’s fairly easy to deduce what caused that jump.
Engagement
This is a metric that should be relatively simple, but often isn’t. In its most basic definition, engagement with a social media post occurs when someone “likes,” “shares,” or clicks on your post. Here’s where things get hairy: most social media platforms have similar forms of liking and sharing, but they often act in subtly different ways. Additionally, many businesses struggle with their own definition of engagement. Would they prefer a post to get shared heavily, but not read very often, or do they want consumers reading their posts more so than passing them onto their friends? The answer to that question, unfortunately, varies from business to business.
Share of Voice
No action occurs in a vacuum. The same holds true for social media. Rather than trying to gauge your social media performance without context, utilizing the share of voice metric will clue you into how well you’re doing in relation to your competition. With this metric you can see your place within your given industry, and what percentage of the conversation revolves around you and your brand.
Conversion Rate
Now we get down to brass tacks. At the end of the day, every business needs to bring in revenue and drive sales to be successful. And your conversion rate can provide a direct measure of how well your social media posts generate sales. Unfortunately, lots of businesses only track conversions up to a certain point and have no way of monitoring a leads’ behavior once they decide to go offline and make a call. That’s why call tracking is essential to establishing accurate conversion rate numbers. By tracking online-to-offline conversions with unique tracking numbers, you can actually determine which social media posts (and ads, and blog posts) generated sales.
Ultimately, every company should look to create revenue through their social media efforts. Though that sounds obvious, plenty of businesses don’t seem to make this a priority.
The Bottom Line
A thriving professional social media page is fantastic, but business owners should recognize that it’s merely one component of a larger marketing/advertising strategy. As such, progressive companies know to study certain social media metrics closely –– because they realize the value they bring to their operation as a whole. Contact the Advocado team today if you’re ready to start analyzing and optimizing your marketing and advertising content in a deeper, more productive way. Plus, to see the effects of call-tracking technology firsthand, download our free case study here: