How should businesses create a plan for social media and how will they track their success?

Often times when I speak with businesses who wish to use use social media for their organizations, either they’ve never thought about tracking ROI or they don’t think they can. It takes a bit of elbow grease, but there are metrics you can use to track the success of your social media program.

Before you go any further, here’s what you need to know:

• Business plan (know your company’s objectives -> increase revenue, reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction etc.)
• Social Media Audit (review your website, your social sites, review sites — see how you’re doing vs. competitors re: mentions, engagement etc. to give you a baseline to measure against.) [Learn How To Do An Audit Here]
• Benchmarks (Get an idea of what’s happening in your industry so you know how you are performing against them – are you lightyears ahead or behind?)
• Basic Analytics
• Native Analytics

“About 61% of small businesses don’t see any return on investment on their social-media activities, according to a survey released Tuesday from Manta, a social network for small businesses. Yet, almost 50% say they’ve increased their time spent on social media, and only 7% have decreased their time.” [USA TODAY]

Unless you’re a giant brand like Coca Cola or Audi, and have a massive budget allocated to social media, you probably need to know whether it’s working or not. Now keep in mind that the primary goal of social media is to be social, but if you’re spending time, money, resources on social you need to tie it back to a business objective. Therefore you’ll want to take a look at social media ROI and the metrics.

Popular Social Media/Marketing Metrics:

• Engagement Measures how people are participating in the conversation surrounding your brand.
• Share of Voice Measures how the conversation surrounding your brand compares to conversations about your competitors.
• Volume Measures the size of the conversation surrounding your brand or a specific brand campaign.
• Reach Measures the spread of a social media conversation.
• Influence Measures who is talking about your brand and what kind of impact they have. {I left this one last because marketers don’t seem to agree on it!}

While the popular metrics listed above can give you some insights into your social media program (including how your content is performing, whether you’re reaching a certain number of people etc.) they don’t necessarily correspond to your business objective(s). Therefore, consider the following social metrics designed by Avinash Kaushik:

Conversation Rate = # of Audience Comments (or Replies) Per Post

Amplification Rate = # of Share Clicks Per Post (or Video)

Economic Value = Sum of Short and Long Term Revenue and Cost Savings

Applause Rate = # of Favorite Clicks Per Post

Acquiring a high Conversation Rate forces you to make sure that you’re always adding value to the people you’re engaging with on social media. Acquiring a high Amplification Rate forces you to examine which types of content are shared beyond your 1st degree connections or network. The networks then make a shift and the 2nd degree connections/network will become your 1st degree. Acquiring a high Applause Rate forces you to really key into the content you’re providing – more likes indicates that you’re on the right track. Finally, Economic Value is where you can actually show the bottom-line impact. You do this by identifying your macro and micro conversions, then creating custom reports in GA to segment appropriately. Accessing this data can be time-consuming – you’ll have to pull it from a few places and it can be challenging to get meaningful insights. This is where your Google Analytics paired with native analytics and tools like Hootsuite, SocialChamp or TrueSocialMetrics come in handy. There’s a lot of heavy-lifting in the beginning to get custom reports set up, but it will save you time in the long run when it comes to analyzing and reporting!

And don’t forget to look at small data!

How To Create A Social Media Plan:

Objective: why does your company exist?
Goals: Goals are specific strategies leveraged to accomplish business objectives
KPIs: Metric the helps one understand how you’re doing against objectives
Metrics: Numbers
Targets: Numerical values predetermined as success/failure indicators
Analysis: use google analytics, native analytics and consistent reporting style

MACRO conversion: measuring outcomes.
MICRO conversion: a step towards MACRO conversion.

Your Macro Conversion can be something like ‘increasing revenue’ which doesn’t directly translate over to social media, because the purpose of social is to be… social. Therefore, you should consider a micro conversion that will support your overall macro conversions. By taking this approach you’ll have the opportunity to understand who visits your social sites, why they visit and allow you to make tweaks.

For example, the goal of my website is to share valuable content with readers via the blog; I share links to my blog via social with the goal to acquire repeat visitors (a.k.a.: loyalty.) Reaching this goal is a micro conversion. Make sense?

EXAMPLE: Real Estate/Realtor Social Media Plan

Real Estate Agent wants to leverage social media (specifically Facebook) for her business.

OBJECTIVE: Sell more houses (increase revenue)

GOALS:

• Create Awareness
• Become a trusted realty resource
• Generate Leads

KPIs:

• Create Awareness -> Amplification Rate/Conversation Rate
• Become a trusted realty resource -> track UTM on specific content/campaigns
• Generate Leads -> # of sign ups

TARGETS:

• Create Awareness: Amplification Rate of = Conversation Rate of = 0.45+ (average across Real Estate Industry)
• Generate Leads: 50 sign ups m/m
• Become a trusted realty resource: visitor loyalty; 45% repeat visits to site

{This is where an audit, baseline & benchmarks come in handy for your industry.}

Running a social media program, I will test the same information in various content  forms to see which gets the most traction. At the end of the month, I’ll look at the numbers of people engaging with it (Conversation Rate/Amplification Rate) to make decisions on the next months content.

REPORTING:

If you’re putting together a report for your boss, your client or yourself you probably already have a few things you want to touch on: content that performed well, posts that didn’t perform well; highlights in terms of referrals – reach (even though it’s not the greatest metric, some bosses love to hear it.) What were people saying? Were there any negative comments? Actions? To put a report together, use native metrics, analytics from schedulers, Google Analytics (UTMs) etc.

Tips For Real Estate Agents Using Social Media:

• Don’t tell them, show them
• Build trust and give people a reason to visit your social media pages
• Tell stories
• Don’t just hammer people with your listings; always add value
• Ask questions & engage
• Respond to comments on your page
• Consistently check your analytics to see which type of content is helping

Need help getting started? Learn More About Our Service: Social Media + Digital Marketing Launch! 

Sources:

https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-101-definitions-goals-metrics-kpis-dimensions-targets/#objectives
https://blog.bufferapp.com/utm-guide
https://www.quora.com/Does-Social-Media-Analytics-has-a-future-Or-will-it-die-a-slow-death-with-Social-Media/answer/Peter-Claridge?srid=uXF0e&share=78ea96f5
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/advanced-facebook-page-insights-analysis-guide-for-marketers/?utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_medium=LinkedInPage&utm_campaign=New
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/how-use-built-social-media-analytics-uncover-hidden-insights