Obsessed with B2B marketing? You should be a PRO member! Join now at 25% off. Offer ends Friday!

Social media is full of numbers, but most of the time we don't use them in any actionable way. The reason is simple: Social metrics are often too complicated to understand, and they provide few clues on how we can improve our success.

The reality is that the return on social media marketing can vary widely for each business. Some companies see quick and immediate returns, while others fail to see much of anything at all. What could the problem be? And, more important, how can we be sure that our business won't fail online?

This article looks to answer those questions by offering a few quick-and-dirty methods for gauging your online marketing strengths and weaknesses.

Through the use of these basic metrics (the data for which you are in all likelihood already gathering), you can gain insight about how you are actually performing and glean some good ideas on how you can improve performance.

We'll start by asking three key questions, and then we'll do some basic calculations to measure our success in each area:

  1. Are my efforts bringing traffic to my website?
  2. Is my social reach growing?
  3. Are people enjoying my content?

Remember, these are intended to be rough calculations that give us a general idea of success. They may not be perfect, but they will give you actionable insights you need to succeed online.

Question 1: Are my efforts bringing traffic to my website?

One of the primary reasons for any business to get involved in social media is to bring traffic to its website. Your social presence has intrinsic importance, but it means much more if it's serving that greater need. Without being obnoxious and sharing a link to your website every five minutes, you should make sure that a steady stream of traffic is flowing as a result of well-planned efforts on your social media properties.

The good news is that most of us are already tracking this information. Google Analytics is free and can be installed on your site easily. If your site is running on WordPress, then the Jetpack plug-in will provide you with a completely free stats package in a matter of minutes.

Once you have implemented an effective method for monitoring traffic, you need to check on two metrics: monthly referral traffic and month-over-month traffic growth.

Metric 1: Monthly Referral Traffic

You need to know where your traffic is coming from. For most websites, the top source of traffic will be Google. After that, though, you should be seeing the social networks that you participate on. A simple way to measure their share of traffic is to add up all of the visits from social networks in a month, and then divide that number by total traffic. That calculation will tell you what percentage of your traffic is generated from social media:

Metric 2: Month-Over-Month Traffic Growth

Most stats packages track two useful types of monthly traffic (among others): new visitors and total pageviews. Don't get hung up on either; for tracking purposes, just pick one. Take a single month's traffic and compare it to the traffic from the same month in the previous year. You will end up with something like this:

This is a helpful metric to track each month. I have a spreadsheet set up in Google Docs documenting our progress month over month for the last couple of years.

Question 2: Is my social reach growing?

Social reach is basically a reference to the size of your social media audience. It is true that every social network prominently displays your follower count on its site, but how much do these numbers really matter?

Enter your email address to continue reading

A Quick-and-Dirty Social Media Analysis That Won't Cost You a Dime

Don't worry...it's free!

Already a member? Sign in now.

Sign in with your preferred account, below.

Did you like this article?
Know someone who would enjoy it too? Share with your friends, free of charge, no sign up required! Simply share this link, and they will get instant access…
  • Copy Link

  • Email

  • Twitter

  • Facebook

  • Pinterest

  • Linkedin


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Garrett Moon

Garrett Moon is the CEO and a co-founder of marketing calendar provider CoSchedule.

LinkedIn: Garrett Moon

Twitter: @garrett_moon