While social media can be a good marketing platform, it can be time consuming if you fail to set the right priorities, especially if your brand in new. Many of the brands out there focus more on the followers they’re gaining on Facebook and twitter and other social media platform forgetting some other important metrics. These metrics are critical in achieving the desired results in social media marketing.
It is important to note that, social shares cannot be used to measure the effectiveness of your social media campaign. There are several reasons that form the basis of this statement.
- The social shares can come from people outside your target audience/customers
- There are thousands of shares generated by bots
- People talking negatively about your brand can also be part of the social share
This observation is an indication that there is need to focus on other metric that will help you understand the impact of your social media campaign other than Facebook likes and retweets. The major objective of any social media campaign is to increase brand awareness and engage your audience. Here are more metrics that can help you gain valuable insights about your social media campaign.
- Brand sentiment: The notion that all publicity is good publicity is an illusion. Negative sentiments posted on social media by your clients can destroy your brand within no time. You can use Socialmention and Meltwater tools to measure sentiments about your brand. There is also the need to have a well laid out plan on how to respond to negative sentiments. Moreover, you can hire an expert in reputation management.
- Search Volume: The more the brand is exposed on the social media platform, the more it is searched on search engines. This underlines the need to use this metric in order to plan an effective social media campaign. To help you gain more insights on search volume, you can use Google Insights and Google trends. With these tools, you can compare your search volume with your competitors’. It will help you adapt a more competitive approach while engaging your customers on social media.
- Lead and Conversation Growth: How do you tell if your growing numbers of social followers and social mention contribute to targeted leads and conversation growth? There are programs like Marketo or Convertro that can help you to measure how many web page visits, twitter reaction or any other social media interaction converts to been a customer.
Social media optimization is critical in your social media marketing campaign. It can be the platform that can convert prospective clients to real customers. You can consult a SEO expert to get the best services and save time.