Tracking The Success Of Your Social Media Efforts
Social media can be a great way to find and engage with your audience, build website traffic and increase website conversion. It also works particularly well alongside a SEO campaign. Whilst a lot of businesses are now realising how important social media can be, many do not effectively evaluate how successful their social media efforts are. Or in some instances, people just don’t know how to measure this success.
The first thing you need to do, before you even begin your social meda use, is to define what you’re looking to achieve from your campaign, meaning you can better evaluate its relative success. Goals would most likely be things like building brand awareness amongst the public, engaging user responses, increasing traffic, improving customer services, etc.
You could probably say the most often requested goal of social media marketing is to raise the amount of traffic coming to a particular website, so let’s look at this example.
Google Analytics would probably be the best tool available to you for measuring traffic to your website. Whilst a lot of companies use this free service to measure their website traffic, few realise how versatile the software is. Analytics allows you to view referring sites, which means you can see exactly how much traffic has come from particular websites. This will mean you can properly track how much traffic each social media site is sending you, allowing you to compare figures from before and after you social media campaign has started. Using this information will allow you to effectively track the success of your efforts.
There are also a huge number of tools and applications online that will analyse your URL and evaluate which sites are referring traffic and how many inbound links there are to your site. Xinu is a particularly good example of this; spend some time looking online and you’ll find numerous helpful sites.
No matter what you’re industry, from web design to landscape gardening, you could hugely benefit from a measureable social media campaign, particularly in addition to a dedicated SEO strategy. Many companies are now choosing to outsource social media marketing to external agencies, which is a good idea if you have the budget, as you’re more likely to see a successful campaign and a return on your initial investment.