Social Media Content, Part 4: Measuring Your efforts

Social media is difficult enough to keep up with, businesses really can't afford to be wasting their time. To build an effective social media content strategy, seeking and building audiences and learning their language is key. But, if you really want to make progress, it's important to check up on yourself. In a way, this is saying not to trust your efforts in employing all the recommended tools to locate potential audiences, engage them in conversation, and expand your horizons, at least not initially. But, it could also be admitting the obvious: that the social media world is tricky to navigate and will take practice and refining efforts.

Not surprisingly, just as there are tools for every step of creating a social media strategy, there are tools for measuring your progress in doing so. If you're just starting out, the best way to measure the headway (or lack thereof) you're making is to keep it simple. Count the number of "likes" and comments your Facebook profile gets. Track the number of followers your Twitter posts and page(s) garner. If you have a blog (and it's a really good idea to), keep a record of how many comments each post receives. Take an inventory of these monthly. Pay attention to the traffic funneled to your website(s) from social media sites - as in, how many hits is your actual business website getting from either your or other activity on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, etc.?

Something that all businesses, particularly small businesses, should note: it is most telling to look at the influence you are having locally first. Especially if you are a small business, or a business in a small town, you're probably not going to making headlines on Facebook or topping the Google Trends list. That doesn't mean, though, that you're failing. It just means that there are probably pockets of untapped audiences yet to be reached - or, even better, that you are reaching them and not knowing it! And there's little more frustrating that having an effect but not knowing it (so feeling like you're not) aside from just not having an effect at all.

Once you've mastered the art of comment counting, Google Analytics offers a tool to help you gain insight into your website traffic. Google Analytics guides you in goal-setting and helps you measure desired results against actual outcomes, providing useful data for shaping new marketing techniques and social media content. It has a tool to track mobile web activity, an important and growing facet of social media. Additionally, Google Anaytics helps businesses find and utilize popular keywords about your particular service, locate and effectively target the best markets, and provide feedback about how such efforts are faring. With the complicated nature of social media (and it is bound to only get more complex as time goes on), and the simultaneously importance of it for businesses, the businesses that will improve will be the ones measuring their efforts.

Photo Credit:  Teresa Basich