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.
