Swift Six: Measuring your social media success
Hello and welcome to another Swift 6. If you’ve seen these videos before, you’ll notice that we’ve updated the style a little bit. Hope you like it. Anyway, this time we’re looking at measuring your small business’s success on social media. This is absolutely crucial because if you don’t measure social media, you won’t know if what you’re doing works and if you don’t know what works, you could be wasting your time.
The video’s below, just click on it to get started. If you’d prefer to read instead of watch, I’ve included a copy of my script below the video.
First of all, an obvious one: Fans, followers, and page likes. This metric represents the size of your audience, the number of people you can potentially communicate with, for free, through your social channels. However, it has to be said that not all fans are equal. If you run lots of competitions then you’re likely to pick up serial competitors who have no other interest in your brand. Your perfect fan is someone who already buys from you, or someone who is likely to buy from you in the future, based on their interests, industry and behavior. Both Facebook and Twitter can give you a really good understanding of these interests within their Analytics tab.
Second: Total interactions. This is the number of times someone has interacted with your content, be that a like, share, comment or click. It’s a measure of whether your audience is interested in what you have to say, or couldn’t care less, or in fact don’t see it at all.
And from the first two, we go on to calculate the third, which is the engagement rate. This is the number of interactions divided by the total audience size. This tells you what percentage of your audience cares about your message. The great thing about this metric is that it doesn’t matter how many fans you have, you can still benchmark yourself against your past performance, when your audience size was smaller, or in fact against competitors who might be a lot bigger. It gives you a real sense of whether or not you’re improving/
The fourth one to focus on is Reach or impressions. This is the total number people your content is reaching, and the number of times it appears for them. As you might well know, Facebook significantly limits the number of people who see your post. A business’s post is likely to be seen by only 1% of its fans. The reason they do this is because they want you to pay to promote your content. What this metric will tell you is whether or not you need to dip in your pocket in order to reach more people with your content. You may well have a low number of interactions, despite having a decent number of fans, simply because your reach is so small.
The fifth metric I recommend considering is Response rate. This is a fairly new one to think about. It reflects how quickly you get back to people through your social channels, and is a good measure of your customer service levels. Facebook will automatically give you this stat, and even give you the chance of publishing it on your Facebook page. For the other platforms you’ll need to use a 3rd party tool such as Sprout.
The 6th metric to consider is all about your website and that’s the visitors and conversions that your social channels are sending you. You can get both of these from Google Analytics. Now I’m not saying that your social channels are about making sales, but you should at least be able to demonstrate a steady stream of people moving from social media to your site, to read more of the content that you’re posting there. Ultimately, there’s no point in fostering a great community on your social accounts if they don’t visit your website, recommend you, and ultimately buy from you.
And that’s your Swift Six – the 6 social media metrics that you need to focus on. I’ll see you next time.
