Know Your Goals and How to Measure Your Progress

Social media can be powerful, but for some it can end up being a complete waste of time. That’s why you should never jump into your social media strategy without having some goals, and measuring your progress towards those goals.
Remember, being popular on social media can be great fun, but it’s never an end in itself. The goal should always be to boost your brand and, ultimately, to boost your sales!
It can be hard to measure your branding efforts on social media, but there are a few ways to do it:

Search for Yourself

Regularly search for your name/ your business name across the various social platforms to see what people are saying about you. If they’re constantly sharing your inspirational posts, you’ll know that element of your strategy is working. If, on the other hand, they’re constantly complaining and you’re not seen to reply to those complaints, that can damage your brand.

Keep an Eye on Engagement Levels

If you’re doing things the right way then you’ll see more people sharing, liking and commenting on your posts. Of course, this won’t benefit your business if it doesn’t leave to more sales, but it is a good indication as to whether you’re moving in the right direction.

Website Tracking

Use tools like Google Analytics to see how many people are visiting your site from your social media profile links. You can get very detailed with this, and even figure out how many people are buying based on visits from social media.

This video will show you how to measure traffic from Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus using Google Analytics.

Use a Tracking Tool

Ultimately it’s a good idea to invest in a social media tracking tool – it’ll save you a lot of time! HootSuite is a very popular option for both scheduling and tracking the success of your social media posts.

Revising Your Social Media Strategy

So what do you do with all the information you’ve gathered? You use it to tweak your social media strategy to bring even better results! Here are some things you might want to change:
• The time of day you post,
• The number of times a day you post,
• The number of photos/ videos you share,
• The types of content you share,
• The ratio of promotional to useful posts,
• The number of personal posts you share.
Keep tweaking and tracking until you feel you’ve hit the “sweet spot” that seems to really resonate with your social media followers.
I hope you have learned new things in my 7 Rules for Social Media Branding, and clarified your next or needed steps to get your branding in order.
Remember, if you need assistance, my team and I can help, just give me a shout.
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