When your company is spending serious dollars on your social media efforts, the people upstairs (or in the next office, whatever) want to see results.
The bigger the budget, the more pressure there is to prove that posting all those zany cat memes is for good reason!
Seriously though, like every other business element, social media’s got to prove its ROI.
So in lieu of a crystal ball, let’s explore the IRL ways that you can plan, measure and report on your social media meddling. (Surprise, lots of them involve Lately ☺.)
At the mention of ROI, your first thought was probably financial, but social media value isn’t always just about dollars, believe it or not. It’s about SO much more. An investment in social can provide many other benefits for your biz.
Which is why it’s important to plan your specific goals for your social media efforts with Goal Reminders. This will help you to measure how well you’re doing, every step of the way. Say for example, you’re looking for more brand awareness, so you’ll focus on audience reach and engagement. Here are a few others:
Determine what social media will help your business to do and how and when you’re going to do it. Look at your existing social media performance, so you can create realistic goals.
Most importantly: ask yourself when doing everything you do… Is this pushing forward my goal? It’s so easy to get distracted. Just simply being reminded of your goal helps you and your marketing team stay on track.
An engaged social following like and trust you. Engaging with your customers on social media with the relevant, timely content is a savvy way to build a strong community online and then leverage that trust so they can help you raise awareness and attract new customers. Plan and schedule your social content, so you can capitalize on seasonal, relevant trends and create content that your customers find valuable, sent at the best times.
Then, pop everything into a Marketing Calendar and use a Bulk Scheduler to automatically post your content.
Be proactive on channels and interact with your followers – start a conversation, tag your followers, share their content. Create a mutually beneficial relationship with your social buddies and you’ll enhance their customer experience with your business. Yes, this takes time. But it’s worth it.
It’s key that you’re able to use analytics to determine whether conversion events have come from social media. Purchases, downloads etc need to be tracked back, so you can see if they’re attributed to your social media shiz.
Analyze the leads which converted to sales and which social channels were instrumental.
With your social posts, it’s super important that your followers want to click through to your content or take action too. Use an Automatic Social Post Generator to create dozens of pre-shortlinked and pre-hashtagged social posts in seconds from your long-form content. That way you can maximize content you’ve already created and your posts will be more relevant, enticing and increasing your posting frequency can boost your organic growth.
Mentions, shares, tags etc are all quantifiable metrics to determine how well your content is being received. You can look across your social analytics using Omni-Analytics and then use these metrics to correlate with sales figures.
Put a killer content strategy together and if your sales and social metrics are both positively moving forward, then you can use the strength of your social content as a causal factor. Click-throughs tend to increase when you share your content more than once and Lately perfectly sets you up to decide on the frequency and timings of your posts. Evergreen content can also be repurposed to great effect.
Experiment and play around with your social media marketing activities so you can note down different reactions from your customers through your sales figures. Then you can create content you know your audience loves.
You can also look at the end of your sales funnel first and take a look at which social channels or social content affected their purchasing decision.
With Lately, you can track all of your social media metrics from one place. We automatically create the perfect custom dashboard for your business needs. You can collate your whole campaign and everything in between across a single dashboard.
Plus, everyone in your team can easily access and track campaign progress, so there’s 100% visibility at all times. Tracking’s made easy by unifying multi-channel analytics into single, whole-picture graphs that let you click-through data points and look smart. Cool, huh?
We’ve got an Analytics & Reporting suite which will help you to generate reports and understand whether your social strategy is heading in the right direction or down the toilet.
Easy-to-read graphs, reports and layman’s language will help you to pivot and make changes to campaigns and communicate your findings to others. You can check your metrics daily, choose timeframes and see whether your goals align with your results. Finding what works and what doesn’t helps to increase the value of your social campaigns over time by making them more focused and relevant.
We give you the tools to update and adapt campaigns – the next part is up to you!
Try Lately. Because it’s awesome.
