Author: Chris Heiler
If you're an in-house marketer for a green industry company, social media can be a hard sell to upper management--especially if dollars are involved. Effective social media marketing requires a company-wide investment of valuable time and money into your social platforms and communities. Don't be fooled by everything you read about how social media marketing is "free" and "easy".
If your boss wants bottom line results (i.e. new customers), he or she better be ready to invest the time and dollars required to get them.
As an in-house marketer, you know I'm preaching to the choir when I say a "company-wide" investment is what's needed. You can't do everything yourself. You may be a super-human social media marketer but everyone has limits. Your kryptonite just happens to be the clock staring back at you.
Alright, let's say you dazzle management with the killer social media marketing strategy you just shared over coffee and Krispy Kremes. You got buy-in and they're ready to invest the resources you requested. Sweeeet!
Well, before you create a snazzy new Facebook cover and finally start that Google+ page, you'll need to answer this question: What social media metrics will you use to measure your company's social media success? In other words, what are you going to show the boss when he or she questions your strategy six months in?
Let's talk about three of the best social media metrics you can track. You can go deeper than these three, but these are the basic social media metrics we track for our clients so they should be most relevant for you as well.
Total Social Reach
Your social reach is the total number of followers you accumulate month over month on all of your social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Social reach is a very basic social media measurement and success indicator but one that should be tracked on a monthly and quarterly basis.
I consider a 10-15% increase in total social reach from month to month to be a healthy growth rate. Our social reach increased from a total of 1,172 at the end of Q1 to 1,411 at the end of Q3. That's an increase of about 20% over a six month period. That's not all that great, although social media is not a high priority for us compared to other marketing strategies.
You can't rely only on social reach to tell the whole story about how effective social media marketing is for your company. The next two metrics are even more important for effective social media measurement.
Referral traffic from social media
You won't typically be generating actual leads and closing sales directly on your social platforms. You'll need to move the prospects to your company website first. And this is why the amount of referral traffic from sites like Facebook and LinkedIn is such a key social media measurement.
These numbers will also shine the light on which individual social networks are likely most effective for you based on the amount of referral traffic they are driving back to your website.
You can find these referral traffic metrics by logging into your Google Analytics account and going to "Traffic Sources"--"Social"--"Network Referrals". The screenshot below shows what this looks like in Google Analytics.
New leads and customers from social media marketing
Let's be real: Ultimately, you'll be judged by how much new (and repeat) business you bring in the door for your company. Management should be impressed by consistent growth in your social reach and referral traffic month over month but ultimately they will want to know how many leads and customers can be directly tied to your social media marketing efforts. So if you want their investment over the long haul you better be able to illustrate the payoff with real data.
You'll need to track lead source in some way, whether that's manually in a spreadsheet or in an automated fashion using software like HubSpot. We use HubSpot's Sources tool to track the number of visits, leads and customers from social media. The screenshot below illustrates the number of new leads (or contacts, as HubSpot calls them) from social media, month by month, in 2013.
If you haven't yet created a marketing scorecard for your company, I recommend you download our scorecard template. You can use this template to measure and report on the marketing metrics that matter most to your business. Track the metrics month over month and even by quarter. You can add the social media metrics we've discussed here to this scorecard. A marketing scorecard like this is essential to understanding how your marketing is performing month over month. Use real data to inform your marketing decisions!
When it comes to social media measurement, what numbers do you look at? What social media metrics are most important to your company?
Image credit: Marcus Jeffrey
