If you post on social media with the goal of generating leads or sales, you should be tracking and analyzing the effectiveness of your posts. Go beyond the number
of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ and start looking at which posts drive traffic, engagement, and conversion on your website. The insights you gain will help you understand
and prioritize specific tactics that speak to your audience and lead to sales opportunities. The best way to get these insights is through analytics. Read on to
learn what you can do now to start creating data-informed posts.
With the growing number of social analytics tools, it can be confusing to choose a tool that is optimal for your business. Most likely, you will need a combination of
tools for a comprehensive view of your social media performance. In this post, I will focus on two types of analytics tools that every business should start with:
- Platform Analytics – Social media platforms provide their own analytics tools such as Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics. These tools provide a good starting point for high level statistics such as follower growth, likes/favorites, reach, and post engagement. These tools are free and require little to no setup. Plus, you will be getting data directly from the source.
- Web Analytics – A web analytics platform such as Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics enables you to measure and understand what happens on your website after a post gets clicked. This is done through the use of campaign tracking, which is a unique tracking string that gets appended to each link in a post. The wealth of data you get from using campaign tracking will help you see which posts are the most effective at generating traffic, engagement, and opportunities. In addition, it will help you contextualize your data and see how your social media channels perform against other inbound and outbound marketing tactics.
- Traffic – If you post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any social media site, you will see how many and what percentage of your website traffic comes from each post. Depending on how you set up your campaign tracking, you can also view data for a set of posts specific to a campaign or posts from a particular social media site. To get a bigger picture, you can also view all of your traffic sources to understand what percentage comes from your social media channels.
- Engagement – If you posted about a product or service, you will want to know if your followers viewed the product or service web page. Once they are on that web page, did they engage with the content…download a file, watch a video, etc.? The answers to these questions help you understand which posts lead to interest and action. To get a bigger picture, you can also see how your social media channels stack up against other marketing channels in generating engagement.
- Leads and Sales – With a web analytics tool, you can close the loop and track all the way from a post click-through to a form conversion or online order. Whether the conversion happened directly after the post click or a few website visits later, the conversion will still be tracked back to the post. To get a bigger picture, you can see how the conversion rates for your social media channel compare with your other marketing channels.
Like platform analytics, Google Analytics is also free. Adobe Analytics comes at a price, but is much more flexible for tracking campaigns.
With the combination of social media platform analytics and web analytics, the data and insights you get are extremely valuable to your business. A fine-tuned
view of your posts’ effectiveness to a big picture view of social media performance will help you understand your target audience better and enable you to form a more effective social media strategy. If you are going to post anyway, post smarter with data-informed posts.
This insightful post was written by Natalie Kees, Kees Analytics. Odez Designs recommends a professional analytics consultant like Kees Analytics to give your business maximum potential on the web.