A lot of companies don’t set the right kind of targets for their social media activity, which makes it really difficult for them to measure success or spot opportunities for improvement. Setting targets for metrics like traffic, conversation participation and the number of fans or followers you have is a great starting point.
With these targets in place it's going to be a lot easier to track what actually works. Not everything you do in social media will be a run-away success, but over time you will be able to build a successful strategy based around the activities that had a positive effect on your metrics.
This can also be applied to the social networks you participate in. If you have well defined metrics, it's going to be a lot easier to spot which social networks are working for you and which ones are just draining your resources and offering very little ROI.
1. Fans and followers
Increasing your fan and follower numbers is important, but it’s a bit of an unreliable indicator of success. Set reasonable targets to increase these numbers but remember engagement (i.e. conversation participation and sharing) is more important.
2. Conversation participation and sharing
Judging whether or not your followers are engaging in a ‘good’ amount of conversation and sharing is relative, and it can always be improved. For example, there’s no magic number of retweets you need to hit to be "successful" at sharing on Twitter.
Set targets to increase your posts’ average number of comments, likes, or retweets. Track which sorts of content elicit the best sharing responses and use this to inform your social content strategy to ultimately increase engagement moving forward.
3. Traffic v Conversions
Unless you’re in the business of selling ad impressions traffic probably isn’t a terribly useful metric. Rather than seeking to purely increase traffic, look at which social media sites refer the traffic with the highest conversion rate.
Think both in terms of macro and micro conversions - macro conversions are things like purchases whereas micro conversions are things like signing up for newsletters, downloading whitepapers and so on.
The sites that send the traffic with the best conversion rates should become the priority of your social media strategy.
There are also many ways to determine the financial impact of your social media efforts, - depending on your objectives.
Get your target set best and grow your legacy socially by our full time Social Media Consultant Service.
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