6 Reasons You Need to be Tracking Your Social Media Metrics

Scout+ Customer Service Outsourcing

by Jennifer Williams

It’s 2014.  Social Media is a household name, yet some businesses still aren’t leveraging its power, and more still aren’t maximizing it.

At this point, most businesses know that Social Media can be a powerful marketing tool, but many still aren’t using metrics insights to maximize on that power.

Instead, many businesses create social media accounts and start posting, glancing at built-in analytics and either getting excited or feeling confused or disappointed over results.  By aggressively utilizing metrics, you can track progress, and build on and improve strategies.

Here are 6 reasons your business needs to track Social Media metrics:

1.  Meeting Goals – your social media marketing plan should include specific goals, such as increasing site traffic by x%, increasing brand awareness, new customer acquisition, increasing repeat business, etc.  Once goals are set, using metrics will tell you if your social media efforts are meeting your goals.  If not, strategies can and should be tweaked, and metrics will offer you clues as to how.

2.  Attracting and Building the Right Audience – metrics can illuminate whether you are reaching your target audience.  Are they the right demographics?  As a crazy example, if your product is for women but you keep gaining male followers, those followers aren’t worth much to you.  Looking at the demographics of your following can clue you in to whether your messaging needs to change.

3.  Increasing Conversions – following click-throughs to your site and subsequent behaviors can give you insights into how to increase conversions on click-throughs.  For example, a click-through from social media to a landing page with a call-to-action versus a click-through to an informational landing page should have different goals and different results.  Tracking results and behaviors can offer clues to increase the success of future efforts.

4.  Building Brand Loyalty – Give more of what your customers want by tracking social media metrics.  Metrics can provide insights into what your customers want from you on social media.  The defaults for business are to use social media as a) a customer service portal, b) an engagement platform, or c) a promotional platform. Tracking various types of shared content and resulting engagement will give you a clear idea of what your customers are responding to and want more of.  Listen, through metrics, to what your customers are telling you they want, deliver it, and reap the benefits of more loyalty.

5.  Maximize Efficiency, Decrease Spending – Tracking and measuring social media efforts allows you to fine tune your Social Media efforts to maximize efficiency, resulting in less time and investment waste.

6.  Stay Ahead of Trouble – Tracking online sentiment about your brand can help you stay ahead of any trouble, allow you to respond in real time, and prevent missteps.

If you feel like you’re throwing marketing spaghetti at the wall, hoping for something to stick, start digging into metrics for the clues you need to implement a strong and consistent Social Media strategy.

Jennifer Williams is a Marketing Behaviorist at Verilliance.com, building lean marketing strategies based on consumer and decision science.

Scroll to Top
Scroll to Top