However, measuring ROI is the main struggle of B2B marketers with only 21% of them saying that they are successful in measuring the outcome of their efforts. You won’t experience the wide reach, increased engagement and other benefits of social media if you can’t measure it. In this new blog series, we’ll look closely at how you can measure your social media marketing. We’ll look at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ in the following weeks. Today we’ll mainly focus on the importance of looking at analytics in gauging social media performance.
We can totally relate to some marketers’ hesitation in measuring social media. When you’re already creating the content, scheduling its posting, and interacting with customers, studying analytics may probably be a stretch already. However, not systematically calculating your efforts can result in wasted time and resources. Here are five reasons why it’s important to measure your social media efforts:
It accurately tells you the success (or failure) of your campaign. These analytics can tell you if you’re able to reach the engagement you’re aiming for. Not all posts in social media generate the same level of engagement. The performance of your campaign largely depends on the number of people who participated in your promo, shared your content, and commented on your posts. Knowing the exact figure will help you determine if your campaign was indeed successful.
It shows you where your money should go. Measuring social media shows you which site generates the most engagements and allows you to reallocate your funds to the social networks that give the most returns. In the benchmark report released by CMI, it showed that LinkedIn is the top social media site used by B2B marketers. Despite ranking 4th in terms of number of active users globally, LinkedIn proves to be the most effective platform in B2B marketing and not Facebook, the biggest social network. Analytics will help you see crucial details like these.
It provides room for improvement. When you have metrics that gauge the effectiveness of your campaign, you can easily recalibrate your strategy and go for what works in those sites. By having access to these figures regularly, you can monitor your engagement level daily and adjust your execution as needed. You don’t have to wait for the end of your campaign to generate a report, you can look at it as often as you want and make some changes along the way.
It helps you create appropriate content for each social media site. Sometimes marketers go blindly when they launch a social media campaign and then wonder why certain sites don’t perform as much as the others. More often than not, it’s a content issue. The way you address Facebook users is different from the way you approach Google+ users. You can’t feed them the same content and expect the same results. In fact, the number one initiative that content marketers plan in 2015 is measuring content effectiveness. This is where analytics come into play.
It gives you a clear picture of your customers’ behavior. By defining certain metrics, you can better understand your customers’ behavior such as knowing the kind of content that prompts them to share it or the type of post that moves them to click to your site and browse your product or service. It gives you an idea how many people your post actually reached and how that translated to active engagement. It can help you track hashtags that show the current interests of your customers. Those numbers reflect the behavior of your clients and it’s worth the time and money to know what they think.
Analytics is probably technology’s best gift to social media marketers. You may know how effective social media is but you wouldn’t know exactly its impact to your brand until you start measuring it. Every bit of data counts when we’re talking about social media. It’s a powerful platform where brand commendations and condemnations are made. By studying these figures, you can plan for your social media marketing better and execute your strategy more effectively.
About Pepper Social Media
Pepper Social Media is an online marketing firm that specializes on social media management, content marketing, SEO, PPC, social media marketing, copywriting, and targeted blogging. Our creative team consists of experienced marketing strategists who can fortify your brand identity and amplify your reach.
The perks of social media are beyond measure. In fact, almost all businesses nowadays– whether physical stores or online merchants– are utilizing Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, etc. They know that using social media is an awesome way to better connect with their target market. Entrepreneurs of today have been given so much resources to analyze, study and reach using the Social Networking Sites (SNS).