What are your business goals overall? Increase web traffic by 10% by next quarter? Increase opt in’s to your email list by 25% within 6 months?
Whatever your business goals are, you want them to tie into your social media goals.
Let’s take the ever popular question “How do you get more “likes”?
First we’ll look at this as it relates to social and next, how it relates to your goal of increasing web traffic.
1-Your Growth – Building an audience matters. After all, if you tweet to 3 followers, is that tweet even seen?
When I’m training groups, I’m often asked, what’s a “reasonable” rate of growth. I put reasonable in quotes because while no one wants it to take years to grow a decent sized audience, they know it’s not going to happen overnight. A Facebook Page does not a business make.
What’s “reasonable” depends on factors like
- How many people you have working on your social
- What types of content are your developing
- How consistent you are with your social media marketingIt also matters if you’re starting at ground zero or if you’ve been at social awhile. If you’re using Facebook as your primary channel and you’re posting 1-2x a day for the past year and spending at least $300/month on advertising, you should be seeing an average growth of between 275-350 new “likes” per month.
If you’re posting consistently to your YouTube channel (every week for example) but you aren’t getting many views or subscribers, then you need to look at your content, your video optimization and your distribution methods. For example, maybe your content isn’t addressing the real questions your audience has. Dig deep into your keyword research, hashtags, and LinkedIn groups.
Find out the real questions your customer s have about your solution. Address one per video.
Maybe you have great content but you don’t know how to get it out there. Then you need a clear video marketing strategy with good optimization and a way to integrate it with your other marketing channels such as your blog posts or through Twitter, etc.
2–Increasing Your Engagement – This one may sound a little “fluffy” but it’s important. If no one is “liking”, commenting on or sharing your content, then your social isn’t working.
There’s a caveat: Maybe you just got started and you don’t have many followers yet. But if you’re a few months or a few years in and nothing you post gets engagement, well, then you have a problem.
You’ll need to review three things:
- Your audience –– Are you meeting them where they are both in the questions they have and in the locations where they spend time?
- Your posting schedule — Try posting at different times of day/evening. Many of my clients see more engagement with posts that go out at 9 or 10 p.m. because that’s when their audience is on social.
- Consistency — Do you have a regular schedule or are you prone to posting for a week or two and then forgetting about it?
It takes the right mix of posting consistent, useful/interesting content in the right places for you to gain traction.
Take a look at your metrics on a regular basis. If you’re a small business, monthly will be fine. If you’re a large business with a robust social media presence, someone on your team may look at them everyday. There are dozens of tools to track your metrics such as Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, etc. Use them to see what resonates and to guide future content.
3–Improve (or at least sustain) your engagement: An engaged audience tells you your content is worth talking about which helps you become a recognized leader in your industry and ultimately, helps you grow your bottom line.
Once you find what your audience likes and you get into the rhythm, you might want to either expand to a new platform where they are or put your resources into developing event better content to help your prospects.
At the end of the day, this is all about business. It’s by tracking your metrics, using them to develop more and better content for your audience and continuing to track that you’ll be able to see the difference in your sales.
Action Step:
Review your metrics. See where you can improve. Integrate this information with your marketing strategy and you’ll see positive results.
What metrics questions do you have? I’d love to hear in the comments below.
