There’s no point in ‘doing social’ if you don’t keep an eye on how effective it is. In our previous blog, ‘Social Media Strategy’ we talked about what you see as ‘success’ – is it increasing likes/followers, getting shares or clicks and so on.
Now, we’re looking at how to measure the results of your strategy so you can report to your boss, or yourself if that’s you, and make appropriate strategic changes.
Get a dashboard
That’s a snippet of the dashboard we use to report for our clients. It’s a very simple process of filling in the numbers and doing some maths, but what it achieves is an opportunity to look at which posts were most effective at providing click-throughs to your website, reach or engagement. You will inevitably see patterns, especially if you change the days and timings of posting, the type of post you share and the hashtags/links you choose to include.
You can download a copy of the full social media effectiveness report dashboard from our ‘Helpful Stuff’ section of the website. This is just an idea of what you can include, so feel free to use and abuse it as you wish!
Keep it simple
Previous incarnations of our reporting method included a PowerPoint of images showing good posts and the analytics of the social platform. In the end, we figured out that most clients just want the numbers; it’s the social media manager who wants to see the nitty gritty which is why it’s a good idea to look at your own backend every now and then…
Whatever you choose to record, keep the data you collect simple, relevant and consistent to ensure a uniform snapshot of what’s going on.
Clear conclusions
Whilst you’re digging around in the backend of the various platforms (your website included) you will find out information that will either change or confirm your existing social media strategy. Make a note of which posts were the top performers, when they were posted and what they said. Find out which links provided click-throughs to your website and at what time, note which social media platform is the better performer for click-throughs and which one performs best for customer relationship building.
What are you going to do with the information?
After the data collection and conclusions, comes the recommendations. Please don’t waste your time collecting all this information by not acting on it! Go back to your strategy; is it working? Is the success what you had hoped to see? Are you getting the website referrals and no increase in sales? What can you change, or should you keep it the same?
Your recommendations can be in an email, a Word document or a post it note – it’s up to, it’s your platform, your voice.
We hope this advice and the template is useful to you, please let us know if you have a method that works for you, or if you give this one a try, tell us about it!