In digital marketing circles, ‘social media marketing’ is one of the buzzwords that’s talked of regularly. It’s well understood by those in the know, however for the start-up business owner – or a person who doesn’t know much about this line of work – social media marketing is just a pure expense and not a value-adding activity that translates into tangible returns that the client can see. In other words, money into his or her bank account.

Thus in order to show clients that marketing on social media channels does indeed bring value to the business, there are a number of metrics that you need to measure in order to show your client that they are, in fact, spending money on tangible returns.

Social Media Metrics

Volume

In layman’s terms, ‘volume’ refers to how many people are speaking about you, your product or your particular campaign.

Facebook Insights allows you to measure volume easily with their metric called “people talking about this” which measures how many people have posted about your brand page on other people’s walls.

Learning at what times of the day or week the volume is higher will help you tailor make your posting schedules so that your posts reach more of the relevant people.

Reach and Engagement

Simply put, ‘reach’ is how far the conversation about your brand spread. Yes, a big reach is good but don’t look at it in isolation. Isolate the Tweets or Facebook posts which had the largest reach and then look how many people engaged with it, in other words retweeted it or clicked on the link. This will show you what type of content your audience found the most appealing and will help you to develop more such posts.

Influence

A lot of people these days are branding themselves as influencers. However, a true influencer isn’t just some one who has millions of followers. A true influencer is able to convince their followers to take a certain action like, for example, visiting a particular restaurant because the influencer has recommended it.

So monitor who’s talking about your brand. See how much influence they have – there are many online tools that will help you do this – and perhaps approach them to take part in an influencer campaign for your business.

Share of voice

Finally, to truly quantify how successful your efforts on social media are, you need to determine how much of the conversation is about you. This is because if people are truly interested in you, they’ll be talking about you. And the more they are interested the more they’ll talk. In other words, you need to determine what your share of voice in the entire industry conversation is.

To be able to definitively say how much of an ROI your social media efforts are having on your business, you need to correlate your social marketing media efforts very closely with your sales. You need to determine if when you have a particular promotion on if there is a corresponding spike in sales. You also need to find out, at the conclusion of the sale, where the person make the purchase came from so that you can determine which social media marketing channel was most effective and that you can push more resources into these.

Contact DSM | Digital School of Marketing

Social media is here to stay and, as such, marketing on this channel will remain a mainstay of digital marketing. This means that for your business to succeed, social media marketing will need to become a pivotal point of your marketing efforts. The Digital School of Marketing’s Social Media Marketing Course will teach you everything that you need to know about how to maximise the use of social media for your business. For more information, visit our website.