It’s time to get Social- Engaging Others on Social Media

“Saying hello doesn’t have an ROI.”   Gary Vaynerchuck

What he meant is that the value of relationship building can’t be measured so easily.     This is why it is so hard to measure success on social media.

Engagement on Social Media

The goal of social media isn’t to sell directly. It’s to create engagement and build a relationship. For this reason, you should start measuring success by how much your content is engaging your audience.

Engagement can be measured by things like:

• Clicks on links in your social media posts (this can be measured through your website analytics)
• Comments on your social media posts
• Shares and, on Twitter, favorites and retweets
• Ratings and comments on your YouTube videos
• Comments and shares on your blog posts
• Mentions of your company or brand on social media (you can set up alerts on Google to find these)

While number of followers can be a measure that you’re doing something right, it’s not a very good metric to measure. You can grow your followers a great deal without it necessarily translating to any kind of results. The goal is engagement and conversions, not simply numbers.

Taking Action – Measuring Conversions

An even more important way to measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing is to look at what actual results came from social media. If the end goal is to lead people to your website where they make a purchase, ask your customers directly or with a survey what referred them to your site. See how many of them are referred through social media.

Sales aren’t the only measurement. Whatever action it is you’d like this traffic to take can also be measured. You may want them to sign-up from your list, for example. In that case, again, you’d measure how many of the subscribers came to your list through social media.  Whatever, you chose as your measurement of success, make sure you interview your audience through survey or personal conversation to ensure you are creating a strong relationship with your audience.

Connection, Conversations and Conversion go hand in hand.  This week, I will sharing more ideas on how to engage your audience through your social media efforts.  Feel free to leave me a comment or question and I will respond to them here.