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How to Align Your Social Media Metrics With Real Business Goals

Your social marketing LOOKS cool – the images are sharp and the wording is correct, and it falls in line with your brand. You love it, but is it working? And by working, is it helping your bottom line? Have you sold more product, recruited more employees, and established yourself as a leader in the industry? Can you prove your social marketing is accomplishing this?

If you’re not tracking the stats related to your social marketing, then you’ve got no way to see its effects, so your leads and potential customers may be getting lost. Follow these steps to make sure your social media marketing plan is in line with your business plan and that you can easily see just how well it’s working.

Consider social media marketing just another part of the puzzle. You want to keep your message consistent across all advertising channels, whether on the radio or the screen on your phone.

Just because your messaging is similar doesn’t mean you’re just adding to the mix of your other efforts. The best part of utilizing social media marketing is that you can track nearly everything, from how many clicks an ad gets to who fills out a form on your website to specifically serving only people who have subscribed to your email list with unique online ads. The power to do this is all there – and you thought social was just a place to share funny photos!

Establish Your End Goals

When you start out with social marketing, you need to decide what you want to accomplish with it. Objectives are the name of the game. Do you want to drive traffic to your website? Do you want to encourage form submissions? Maybe you’re looking for more engagement and to build a relevant, larger community around your business. Whatever you decide, social can help support that and precisely track the outcome.

Use Tools to Track Your Goals

Facebook offers intense insights for each post or campaign you launch, calculating the amount of clicks, impressions, conversions, and cost.  In addition, you can use tools such as Sprout Social, Radian 6, or Spredfast to see just how effective your message was in terms of engagement and response time as well as to take note of the comments, questions, and feedback you received. Look at the trends and adjust as needed as your goals change and your business grows.

It’s also suggested that you pay attention to Google Analytics to make sure your social traffic falls in line with your efforts. This is just another way you can pay attention to where your social efforts are sending people. By tracking campaign start and end dates, you can compare results from month to month to see what improved and what didn’t.

Strategically Support Your Goals

Whether you’re promoting your business on LinkedIn or Facebook, the ads you run offer a variety of objectives. So ask yourself, what am I trying to do for my business? From clicks to websites and promoting posts to offers and video views, social can help your business gain exposure to a relevant audience that  most likely will buy your product.

If you want foot traffic, launch an offer with an enticing incentive only redeemable online. If you want to send people to a new blog or financing form, try an ad designed to drive site traffic and conversions.

Social advertising allows you to get granular and specific, not only with your messaging, but also with whom you’re speaking to. It’s no secret that Facebook has access to endless consumer data and behaviors. Talk to the people in your market, get their attention, and track your progress along the way.

Conclusion

As your business grows and changes, you’ll find that social media marketing can promote and support different aspects of your marketing plan, providing proof through insights and metrics every step of the way.

Paying close attention each month to stats and analytics will show that social marketing can work hard for you beyond just likes and can be a leading referral for traffic, inquiries, leads, and revenue. Sometimes it can be difficult to draw the line from efforts to results, but with an effective social campaign tracking ROI, you can easily analyze what’s working best for you.

All the best!

Julia Giacoboni is a Social Media Team Leader at Stream Companies, a Philadelphia-area advertising agency.

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