Social media campaigns can be a vital marketing tool or a complete waste of time. We show you how to track your social media influence and rate the success of your approach.
Growth rate of followers
While having a huge number of subscribers or followers may be one sign of success, that total figure is far from a perfect indicator of how well you are doing. That is because it is static. In other words, while it may be an impressive figure, it does not account for momentum. It does not indicate whether you are attracting more followers, or whether they are beginning to drift away.
Watching the growth rate of your followers or subscribers, on the other hand, reveals those trends. Plenty of apps are available to help make monitoring growth rates easy. Wildfire Social Media Monitor, for example, tracks the growth of all your social media networks, making it easy for you to gauge your growth.
Reach of shared content
Well-shared content will make its way through sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn; it will also be picked up by aggregator sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. By tracking how many shares your content has on these sites, you gain a better understanding of your reach. You learn how far, and how frequently, information from your site is reaching readers.
Some blogs make it easy to gather this information. For example, WordPress offers a plugin that reveals the social metrics for your posts. It shows how many times they have been shared on various social networks.
Website traffic
Another way to determine success is to monitor how many visitors to your website come from social media. More detailed still, you can track what these visitors do, and whether it is in line with what you had hoped your social media activity would achieve. Do they make purchases, for example? Do they contribute to your forum? Google Analytics is a useful tool for this aim.
Number of comments and replies
Tracking comments and replies helps indicate how engaged your followers and subscribers are. If you are getting a lot of hits but very few responses, it could be a sign you should create future content that better draws visitors into the conversation.
Remember, comments happen outside of your social media pages and website, too. If you can isolate phrases that are specific to you, create a Google alert that contacts you whenever they appear online. That step helps you monitor possible levels of engagement outside the confines of your pages.
Alignment between goals and activity
Ultimately, social media success boils down to whether the activity on those websites generates the results you are after. You have to ask yourself: Did we achieve our goals?
For example, if you implemented a strategy designed to increase awareness of your brand, but the only dramatic change you observed was that you received more comments on posts, you did experience some kind of engagement success, but it wasn’t the achievement you wanted. To that end, you were not all that successful. However, if you wanted to increase to use social media to boost the sales of a product through your website by 400% in one year, and that happens, you’ve certainly experienced social media success.
You can track social media success in many ways. Ultimately, the extent of your success depends on whether activity on these sites contributes to the results you wanted.
About The Author
Guest post contributed by Peter Nevis, on behalf of Orange Line Link Building. Peter contributes to various marketing blogs. He’s a marketing expert and enjoys writing articles about SEO & online marketing strategies.
This post was written by BP Guest Blogger. You can visit the Author Archive for a short bio, more posts, and other information about the author.
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