The buzz word this year is social media. Sites that connect
people to one another have become such a huge hit that they’ve gone beyond the
realm of personal use. Businesses now see the benefit of having presence in the
social media scene.
Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are among the most visited sites in the world. In fact, Facebook has over 500 million subscribers. If you’re an online retailer, this could be a potentially huge market for you to tap. It enables you to increase brand awareness, traffic and even reach your conversion goals (sales, leads, subscriptions). Success in this new online space means setting and tracking the right metrics.
What exactly should you look for to say social media has done its job for your company? Here are some things you can objectively measure:
- Traffic: Probably the easiest metric to measure and to set targets for. Social media gives you the ability to exponentially increase views of your website. You can measure traffic to your campaigns, your fan pages and even to the profiles of your company’s executives – whatever you use as a marketing tool needs to be measured.
- Clickthrough to your website: Aside from traffic to the page/post you have on the social media site, you should also consider the actions your fans or followers take. Do they click to your online store to find out more or maybe even make a purchase. The thing to look for when trying to determine this are your stats on referring URLs.
- Conversions: If you have the ability to track the traffic source all the way to the end of the conversion funnel, then increasing conversions should be your main goal. Most analytics software will allow you to set your own conversion goals and even determine the value of each visit.
- Links: Though not directly connected to the conversion funnel, links are another way to determine the success of your campaign. In search engines, the more backlinks and one-way links you have to a website, the higher your rankings. So it’s simple math:, the more people talk about you and link to your website and share it online, the more popular and relevant search engines will consider it to be.
- Word of mouth: The most difficult metric to track is impact of your social media campaigns. This should measure how much your brand is talked about. It will take more than just analytics software to be able to measure this but an actual media monitoring campaign to support your social media efforts. It may be difficult track, but it is actually the most effective metric you can have for any social media campaign. After all, the end goal is to get the news to become viral and to have people talking about you.
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