Measuring Results on Social Media
My perspective on social media is that it's a tool for us to build relationships and converse online. It's an extension of our in-person connections, and now we can reach friends, family, companies, and colleagues -- globally. It's rad.
Let's chat about LinkedIn specifically. Its mission:?connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful.
This tool is to leverage culture, conversations, resources, and community. Have you considered the culture you want to have internally and to showcase as a brand or company? Additionally, why would people want to engage with you?
Ultimately - what value do you bring? What problem do you solve? What do you promise??
The approach I often see is - the more content we pump - the more people will engage. Not necessarily.
Social media seems to be judged on a few factors (don't ask me anything on the algo, I don't make them):
These are pretty high-level technicals but still relevant nonetheless.
Once the foundation is understood, the audience is critical. The beauty of social is that there are many audiences "hanging out" on the same site. For brands/companies:
With each of these audiences, you'll want to consider building personas for each that answers:
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The content needs to impact each of the audience groups. Maybe not every time, but most of the time. Great approaches can be taking a poll, speaking with internal department members, or talking to the audience themselves. (A phone call, an email to a phone call, something where the tone doesn't get lost).
To measure?customer acquisition and retention?- consider using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to track and measure specific users.?
To measure?partners?- consider how many times they tag and reshare, and you'll need to do the same. I believe it's worth integrating the social team into partnership success teams so they understand the dynamic between partners they can reflect that socially.?
To measure?employee engagement?- collaborate with Human Resources (HR) first to see what is possible and the best process to share wins. Then, have a way to celebrate new and existing team members - with easy education tools and resources on how to reshare their successes.?
It's worth categorizing and tagging the backend of social content, so reporting doesn't have to be a pain.?
Benchmarks are tough to Google and establish since each company and person has different variables that affect their performance. I recommend putting together a plan for consistent posting and taking the first month as a baseline. Treat it like you're doing A/B campaigns and test one variable at a time - otherwise, you'll be left questioning what affected what. (Time is already a variable, so limits are reasonable if you have a series of hypotheses you want to test out).
Lastly, when reviewing your monthly findings, compare them to previous periods, and go a step further and compare them to the inception period or year period to see changes.
Questions to ask:
Happy to support where you need.
Senior Communications Manager
2 年Great points! It’s so easy for people to get sucked into the trap of believing that lots of posts automatically means more followers, engagement and success.
Marketing Generalist | Psychology Student, Videographer, Video Editor
2 年Very true. However, I did recently come across something called the "mere exposure effect" in my psychology course book. While not super applicable to social media because of all the algorithms, it might come into effect after algorithms have decided that your posts should be seen by more people.