When starting the social media journey of your website, it is difficult to gauge Return of Investment. Some businesses even end up giving up along the way. Unfortunately, social media isn’t simple. It requires, time and effort to get a grasp. Sometimes leaving others out in the cold. Thus, social media goals are pivotal.
Which Social Media Goals Are There?
1: Website Traffic.
Probably the most important metric in the bunch. Especially if you’re conducting your business, mostly, online. While traffic shouldn’t fully encompass your entire strategical goals. In order to accomplish other goals, you must have a baseline level of traffic. Just creating an elegant and functional website won’t guarantee traffic.
Besides sales opportunities, the more people you have visiting your site. The higher the chances of them engaging with your blog content, clicking on your social media widgets. Even interacting with your brand or sharing your site with friends and followers. Google Analytics makes this process very simple for any website owner.
2: Website Visitor Loyalty.
Each visitor spends a certain amount of time on the site, this metric measures that amount of time. The higher the amount of time spent, the higher the chances of a sale coming through. If the people visiting your page only do it once, then you’re not executing a long-term web strategy. Ideally, you want recurrent & loyal users.
Another very important aspect of visitor loyalty is to understand on average how many visits are required for one of your visitors to convert. A conversion could be a visitor purchasing from your site, signing up for an email newsletter or downloading an ebook.
You’ll need to create a custom segment inside Google Analytics specific to your social media traffic. Visitor loyalty numbers will depend greatly on your site type, your readers and the content you produce. Therefore, it’s important to look at your baseline levels, set a goal and measure your trend over time. For a guide on how to set up Google Analytics for your various accounts, Sprout Social covers this very well.
3: Raising Brand Awareness.
Also, it’s important to stay relevant. If customers aren’t aware of your brand and what it stands for, your business may be spinning its wheels. When customers are aware of your brand and interact with it on different social media sites, they are more likely to recommend it to their friends by liking posts on Facebook and retweeting you on Twitter. In my case, guest blogging and increasing my average daily tweet count from two to five has had the greatest positive impact on my influence score.
4: Conversion Rates.
Finally, most business owners want to understand the direct relationship between social activities and sales. For most of you, the most important web goal is a visitor converting to a lead captured by entering personal information into one of your web forms. For businesses that conduct the majority of business online, these goals are the lifeblood of the organization and are key measures of success.
Even if you’re just getting started acquiring customers online, you should make this measurement a primary focus of your efforts. Using the Social Reports within Google Analytics, you can understand the specific value of each social network. Of course, you need to have goals set up within Google Analytics for the conversion information to be displayed. Visit Neil Patel for a more in-depth dive into these reports & how they work.
In Conclusion
I recommend you measure your social media goals on a monthly basis. Record these numbers in a Google spreadsheet. And monitor the increases or decreases from month-to-month. As a bonus, the metrics outlined here can all be done with free software. Don’t fool yourself into believing that social media is completely free marketing. Your time is valuable, especially if you’re just starting up or you’re a small business. Unfocused efforts spent on social media can quickly become a huge time sink.
By measuring your social media impact, you ensure the best use of your time and resources. Let this post encourage a dialogue down in the Comments section below. All thoughts are welcome.
Until next time, goodbye from the Mark & Ryse team.
