One of the many misconceptions about social media marketing is that it’s very expensive to communicate and engage with your target audience online to get good social media ROI.
Online, you can find many social media channels and 3rd party applications that you can use to monitor (listen) to the conversation on the social web to find out what people are talking about online and what’s trending at the moment. Many of these services are free, but the more advanced ones are not. Even though some of these services are needed with your social media campaign and to measure how far your campaign reach is spreading, there’s no magic button to make social media engagement easier.
If you are interested to get a good ROI from social media, you have to put in the effort and time to truly understand how you can reach your goals with this medium. There’s no “one way” to be successful on the social web. Experiment with new ways to measure what is working for you. Learn what you are doing wrong and optimise your strategy on a consistent basis.
Aligning your social media campaign with your goals
With social media, it’s very important that you align your strategy and your engagement on the social web with your business goals. It shouldn’t live in its own silo. If your campaign supports your business goals, it will make it easier to measure and check if it’s successful or not.
Not only do you need to do some research on which social media channels you are going to use, but also how you are going to use those channels. Are you going to use your business voice and tone when engaging on these channels or are you going to define a more relaxed casual tone that you are going to use to engage via social media?
It really doesn’t matter if you are only going to curate content to share with your target audience or if you are going to create content, it’s very important that you understand your audience on how they are going to react to what you share with them. There are many ways you can determine this and the easiest method is if you create your own content on your blog and share it via social media and then check which blog posts received the most comments, views, and shares.
There are also many other 3rd party tools you can use to analyse how many people are actually interacting and engaging with your content over a period of time. These tools are very helpful because it can make you understand what content your target audience values the most.
Track social media with Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a great tool and it’s free that you can use to track visitors to your website and blog. It’s also useful to know from which social media channels they came. Here’s a couple of tips you can use with Google Analytics to identify which social media channels are driving traffic to your website or blog.
- Source: Google tracks every referral coming to your website and blog. Make a list (export) this data and start segmenting the amount of social media traffic against organic and paid traffic (PPC).
- Segment your data: With your list of social media channels driving traffic to your website, start segmenting the data even further. Which content on which social media channel got the most engagement?
Once you start segmenting the data to analyse social media, you will be able to clearly determine how much influence which social media channel is driving to your website. Doing it this way will help you analyse which channels are the most valuable for your audience to invest your time and effort in to communicate directly with them.