Running a small business online is no small business, period. You’ve got people to talk to, posts to be published, follow trends, and track all the incoming reactions. Sounds a little too much for your average 24-hour day? When you’re on the floor, learning how to measure social media success for your business becomes paramount to growing your business. Take charge of tracking essential KPIs and social media insights to know where you and your business stand. How do you know which KPI works for you? Keep reading.
Social Media ROI
Categorizing your business strategy is the first step in measuring your social media Return on Investment. With social media marketing, you may choose to grow, target an audience or gain exposure. How you measure success on social media depends on your goals and what you want to achieve.
These could be:
- Better Engagement: for when you have everyone on board, but little talk.
- Online Store Promotion: launched your merchandise? Hop onto promotion.
- Brand awareness: your journey to being an entrepreneur.
- Product awareness: let innovation take marketing by storm!
- Generating sales: got flagship service and product? Why wait then?
Once you know what your goals are, you can prioritize any of the below social media KPIs.
What’s a good number for these metrics? There’s no hard and fast rule for this. Generally speaking, so long as you are establishing a baseline and moving beyond that, count it as success!
Online traffic
The traditional and simplest metric used for measuring success online, traffic data can be made available easily using free tools offered on most social media as well as blogging platforms. Even Google offers a free Analytics tool that documents detailed data on traffic to your website from your various social media sites.
When measuring business success online through traffic, make sure to moderate the following:
- traffic volume metrics, which include the number of visits, page views, and followings
- engagement statistics, such as the number of likes gained by a post, comments, and favorited/shared tweets against your page’s total number of fans
- competitive position (compare your engagement metrics to your competition’s) through obvious methods such as page followers displayed publicly, engagement, etc
- length of time visitors stay on your page
- sales conversion rates for social media followers against those from non-social media sources
- number of content downloads; sign-ups to an email list, engagement on blogs, or newsletter; contact form submissions; contest or giveaway entries; and survey responses; poll participation
Community Growth & Engagement
How do you measure social media success at first glance? It’s when your community grows and expands.
In one line, daily nurturing and care let social media apps know that your account is active – which is what social media is all about. Stay relevant AND focused on building the right target audience for your handle.
- Track your Likes, +1s, Favorites, Repins, Saves, Retweets
- Watch your follower’s stories for reposts & screenshots
- Respond to Shares, Comments & Retweets
E.g. Facebook insights – show how your community is interacting with your posts and when your fans are online.
Brush up your Twitter statistics and Instagram insights and consult data analytics of your reach and activity.
For beginners, this might be a good start. Simple acknowledgment means your followers are looking and reading your content. Good to go!
Getting Reach Insights: Levelling Up
In simple words, reach is measured by how many people saw your post or social media ad campaign. Depending on your content, your reach can be of three kinds!
- Organic Reach – The number of followers who see a regular post that you upload
- Viral Reach – Followers who see your content from sharing, suggested posts, or hashtags
- Paid Reach – Non-followers who see your sponsored posts
Plan your posts according to your timeline, categories, and budget if you’re experimenting with your social media posts!
Social Media Referral Traffic & Website Visitors
A website along with your Instagram or Facebook handles often gives you better data to measure your social media success for your small business.
Make use of clickthrough rates (CTR). Design your social media to lead people to a landing page and track link clicks actively. Calculate CTR to understand the effectiveness of your content in getting people to click on your posts. A growing CTR indicates improvement in your overall growth metrics!
- Make use of Affiliate Marketing to know social media traffic
- Use Google Analytics to track the number of website traffic and conversions that come from your social media channels
- Share a link that drives people to your business’s website & track how many people clicked on that link or shared it
Bonus advantage: Driving traffic to your website gives you the chance to capture lead information, like emails, cell phone numbers, etc. for even more conversion!
How does it impact your small business? Increased Sales! Most businesses see a direct increase in sales for services they post about on social media. Better yet, you can always know in person which channel works for you. When a client reaches you, always ask them how they found you!
Increased Visibility: Referrals & Word-of-Mouth
Referrals
Now that you have funneled your client traffic, it brings us to direct and indirect referrals. Many small business owners get regular referrals due to their social media visibility, for everybody who is anybody is logging into social media today.
The simple adage “out of sight, out of mind” remains as relevant as ever!
Word of mouth
- Spend time on your feed.
- Coming up with “I love your content” or “I found you through Instagram” can boost your day and take you far ahead amongst their social circles.
- Look out for social media “lurkers”, that is, your followers who might not engage but know your product!
What’s the number one thing that referrals add to how you measure social media success for a small business like yours? They add to your visibility and exposure to a larger audience and potential buyers!
Sales lead generation
Tracking the source generation lead is the key for this metric to be used as a measurement tool for your business. While professionals mostly have their ways of figuring out the source of the lead, here are some ways in which you can detect the same:
- Generate a survey sheet and include a field in the form asking how customers found you
- track your website traffic from social media insights, platforms such as Instagram and Facebook offers free page insights on business or professional accounts
- Break down the total data of the percentage of total leads coming from social media
- Divide your total leads by your total followers across every social media platform to understand the activity of your followers
- Track and compare the leads generated by individual social media platforms to determine where you’re being the most effective.
Exly’s analytics dashboard provides you with a one-stop solution for tracking all your leads coming through various sources. Explore them today.
Using social media successfully takes time and patience and Rome was not really built in a day. Be consistent about listening, measuring, and learning through everything. Then adjust your strategy on the basis of what’s working best. It’s a continuous yet dynamic cycle.
Read more about social media marketing for business in the book: Social media: A guide for entrepreneurs.
How Can Exly Up Your Business?
Exly serves as a tool for creators and entrepreneurs that allows them to present themselves better for boosting their market image and conducting sales and conducting conversions at a faster and more effective pace. Users get to conserve their brand personality and recognition through a personalized web page and 100% credibility for their services.
Having said that, there are hundreds of tools out there in the market that already offer what we do, so what makes Exly different? It is the variety of options offered to users to choose, select and pick their way through their webpage and boost their brand presentability, without any hidden charges or strings attached. So what’s the catch? None. Exly’s only business is to help run your business better and that is it. Creators pay only when they are earning themselves and are allowed to utilize any of the tools offered by us till then, for free.
Over 20,000 creators and entrepreneurs have joined the team, polling Exly as one of the most convenient tools for managing a business. Keep scrolling to know exactly how exactly it can help you grow your social media presence for your business.
Take ownership of your business
Having a webpage adds a professional quotient to your brand and can be a stepping stone for your content business. Your webpage becomes your personal business representative and at the same time acts as an assistant in handling your day-to-day tasks, automation requirements, and more. Exly wraps all of those features into a nutshell and presents it to you in the shape of your own webpage, so you can go ahead and pick what works for you!
After your Exly web page becomes uniquely yours, you get to work on a tailored promotion plan that aligns with your needs and requirements so you can reach new customers and attain objectives.
Let Exly Do The Math For You
Track your revenues, lead interactions, and promotions so you can get important insights into your business with our tools, especially catered to suit the creator’s needs, for free of cost. Bid goodbye to the boring math stuff and let our expert tool guide you.
Use our marketing and analytical tools and know what works the best for your business.
Make Your Business User-friendly
Your Exly webpage gives you ample space to list your best-loved classes and sell your packages or subscriptions. Make sure you use it to the fullest as it adds a brownie point to your marketing strategy.
Have It All With Exly
Besides giving you the added advantage of transforming your vision into a brand, your webpage takes on the role of your second hand in conducting your online business.
Here is how you can use Exly as your second hand:
- Manage your online or offline classes conveniently
- Schedule appointments and group workshops in just a few clicks
- Enlist previously recorded content
Get Assisted With Your Classes
You take care of your products and services or classes and let Exly do the rest for you. Exly delivers your meeting links, class reminders, and newsletters to your customers for you. It also auto-renews subscriptions of your classes for your students. If only it can get any better, Exly’s support system is available within a 24-hour window to resolve any issues that you might face.
Collect Payments
Collect domestic as well as international payments online and keep a track of your finances on the same platform in a safe and secure way.
The Conclusion
‘Tracking social media success isn’t an easy job. Consistency, experimentation, and understanding of performance are the ultimate KPIs of all. Plan your social media and website accordingly!
As of now, here is a run-through of the guide to measure social media success for your small business. How to measure Social Media Success for your small business?
- Social Media ROI
- Online traffic
- Community growth and Engagement
- Social Media Referral Traffic and Website Visitors
- Increased Visibility: Referrals and Word of Mouth
- Sales lead generation
How Can Exly Help Your Business?
- Take ownership of your business
- Let Exly do the math for you
- Make your business user-friendly
- Have it all with Exly
- Get assisted with your classes
- Collect payments seamlessly
With Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and social media handle popping up each day, creators today like to keep all their cards on the table. Surfacing up to visibility in that pool of creators where users flip through dozens of profiles each day, can often be a task hardly achieved. With Exly, influencers take a step towards catching the worm, regardless of whether they are early or late.
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