How to Measure Social Media Impact

You are posting on Facebook, tweeting on Twitter and pinning on Pinterest but how is this affecting your sales conversions? Let's take a look at how to measure social media impact.

Before you do anything else you need to establish social media goals. Determine how social media will align with your overall brand, marketing, public relations and sales goals. This will grow a positive online community and following that engages with your company/brand. It will provide an active flow of information between you and your customers and will increase the brand recognition in the online space. Objectives need to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. Raising brand awareness to increase brand recognition and online influence, creating loyal website visitors and boosting community awareness and engagement are important. An example of this would be a need to drive website traffic to increase website conversions using engaging content.

Next you need to create metrics to measure the goals. You can track URL shares, clicks and conversions that move through the various social media sites listed on your website, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and You Tube using Google Analytics.  It will also be important to track what visitors do once they end up on the website. You need to measure what pages and products are viewed and whether a sales conversion takes place.  A suggested way to accomplish this is to apply specific coupon codes to each social media site. From there you can measure where the engagement is and how it is affecting sales.

Now you need to continually monitor  the metrics on a daily basis in order to see how the social media engagement is progressing.  Through daily reports you will be able to determine what is working and what isn’t.  You can use these reports to determine what needs to changed, adjusted or improved.

With careful planning, relevant content and constant monitoring social media can play an integral role in the sales effort.