Measuring The Real Results Of Social Media
If you are like many business people, you may wonder how much time and money you should invest in social media on large networking websites like Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. You might havealready invested in these platforms, but you are not sure that you can measure any tangible results. While it’s nice to see a growing number of fans and followers on your business pages, it would be even nicer to correlate that with an increased number of leads and sales.
Measuring Social Marketing Performance
One of the most difficult things about assessing the benefits of social media efforts is that some important benefits are intangible. For example, brand awareness might be one of the main goals of your campaign, but it can be hard to measure the way that increased awareness has impacted your sales unless you do absolutely nothing else to generate sales and leads.
Information Today is a website mostly aimed at librarians and information gatherers, and they have published some topical insights for business people who need a way to quantify the results of their efforts. They suggest these simple tactics to measure the effectiveness of your campaign:
- Analytics: If your goal is to increase the number of visitors to your website, you should have tracking in place on your site to see where visits originate. If your goal is to get the phone to ring, you can either dedicate a phone number to your efforts or simply train your representatives to ask where the call came from.
- Search results: Spend the time to measure your ranking in popular search engines, and you should do this both before and after a search media campaign.
- Internet mentions: Google Alerts is a great tool to alert you to mentions of your business website or social media page on other Internet properties.
