6 Ways to Optimize Your Social Media Metrics
April 24, 2019
Using metrics to perform a social media audit helps you identify areas where your page is performing well or lagging. One of the best things about social media is your ability to track and follow all the ups and downs your business encounters.
If you’ve been considering a social media audit but are unsure about which metrics to study or how to read them, this document is for you. Here, we’ll discuss the best way to track your accounts, analyze data and choose the best course of action based on those results.
1. Track Your Involvement: Before you can begin reading the analytics reports on various platforms, you need to track down all the accounts you’ve registered. Make a list of the social media platforms you’re part of, and put an Asterisk next to the ones you’re most active in. Look at how often you post and when the last time you logged in was, as well as the level of customer engagement you have.
Just because you’re not overly active on one platform, doesn’t mean you should drop it. In fact, it could mean the opposite – that you should amp up your activity and take more interest in that account. It all depends on what your audit uncovers.
2. Rank Each Account By ROI: Whether you’re active on a particular site or not, rank each account by current ROI potential. Depending on the CRM you use, you may be able to see all this information from your dashboard. If not, you can manually determine how many shares, likes, comments, and follows you’ve received in the last few months through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc., analytics.
Putting your social media accounts in order from the most beneficial to the least beneficial will help determine where you should be spending time and money. Accounts which have a high rate of traffic and sharing are more likely to increase brand awareness and revenue, making it an ideal investment. Whereas, an account which sees minimal activity shouldn’t be the target of any big spending until you’re certain there’s an opportunity for advancement.
3. Review Specifics from Each Profile: Now’s the part for the real data collection. It takes time and can be extremely boring, but hey – it pays off. Things you’re looking for during this audit might have already turned up in our last step. Things like site traffic and community engagement can be carried over from one audit to the next. You’ll also want to review sales and revenue earned as a direct result of your social media accounts. Some other things to consider include:
• Number of followers
• Average number of shares per week
• Which post is top of your recent posts?
• Which post is on bottom of your recent posts?
If you’ve never tracked this kind of information before, it’s going to be something of a chore. However, there are tools and apps you can use in the future to track this information for you. Many third-party CRM tools will monitor all your social media, blogs, and website traffic and send you weekly reports on whichever metrics are most important to you.
4. Consider Weeding out the Duds: Of all the social media profiles you use, there are bound to be some which just have no real value. If you’re spending more time and money keeping them going than you’re seeing in return, it’s time to quit. For some businesses, there are just some social media platforms which don’t translate well with their client-base. There are different age ranges for users of each site; there are also interests to consider. For example, if you own a law firm, there might be less to post on sites like Pinterest that your clients will be looking for, whereas, LinkedIn is a perfect place for a high-priority, formal business, like law.
Getting rid of this “dead weight” will give you less to monitor and send content to. It also means less confusion for the customers who want to follow you on all your social media platforms.
5. Analyze Again: Now that you’ve listed your accounts, checked the ranking, reviewed analytics, and weeded out the platforms that aren’t working for you, you might consider analyzing again. Re-visit the stats you’ve been pouring over recently to see if there’s anything that should be changed, or any site you’ve kept that should be cut.
With a clear view of what you want to accomplish and where you’re accomplishing it, you can safely implement a performance tracking app.
6. Update and Refresh: Now that you know what’s what, it’s time to refresh and update the accounts you’ve decided to keep. Search engines like Facebook look for content freshness every time they send a crawler bot to check your pages. Be sure you’ve got recent and relevant content uploaded on each of your accounts. It’s okay to use the same content on each account if you tweak it a little. For Instagram use a photo, for Facebook add a meme, for Twitter cut your post down for so many characters and attach some hashtags.
In closing, auditing your social media accounts doesn’t need to be an intimidating or stressful task. The more often it’s done, the less work it becomes and the faster you read your results and improve your posts. When in doubt, there are many social media management companies happy to assist with audits to get the ball rolling and show you how to maintain your accounts.