We live in an exciting time. At no other point in history has human civilization been so connected and intertwined. With the rise of social media as the fastest growing medium in history, 1 billion of the world’s population is now on Facebook, Google Plus harbors about half that and the rest hold too many to count.
So if you’re still debating whether to dip your toes into the vast sea that is social media marketing, then your argument has been countered and you’ve lost. With the numbers like those above, your customers are already on social, and they’re probably already talking about you. Wouldn’t it be useful to know what exactly they’re saying and why?
We already know the how important SEO social marketing is. Equally important are the social media metrics and analytics that measure the effectiveness of your strategy. But, what you may not know, is how to translate the data received from analytics to social media success both local and beyond.
Let’s go through a few tools you can use to get started quantifying your sales funnel to tell which elements of your marketing plan are converting, and which aren’t.
First, Understand User Psychology
A person doesn’t go on Facebook to shop. It’s their time to take a break, chat with friends and perhaps play some games. When a user engages with you, it’s not because they want to necessarily buy your product catalog or sign up for your services.
No, it’s more likely because you provided some sort of informational value to their social experience. Maybe you posted a blog article relevant to a new fan that they can now share with their network, spreading your brand. A social marketing agency understands this, but the average user often doesn’t.
Don’t be annoying, or overly “sales-man.” With social media, just as in life, there is a personal-space bubble that most functioning members of society respect. With data driven social marketing, you can now find channels and opportunities to burst that bubble and make ‘em convert.
Download An Analytics Tool for Social Media
If you don’t have an analytics tool, Google Analytics works for most companies’ social media metrics measurements, but there are plenty of other options.
Google Analytics is a free service offered by the search engine marketing giant, and will lay out detailed statistics for your website and social account traffic. From here, we can see which paths your users are taking to convert and which parts of your funnels are weak.
Google Analytics also offer AdWords integration for PPC and keyword planning so you can optimize social content. It shows you data which you can compare and utilize in numerous ways. You can find your target audience, compare age, gender, time of day, referral sites, IP addresses, OS types. The tools and the ways to use them are endless and essential for your success in social marketing. Educate yourself with Google’s Analytics Academy before trying to implement your tracking code though, it can be tricky.
Once you’ve downloaded the analytics tool and gone through the course, you are now on your way to boosting your social marketing metrics. Let’s continue the journey by delving deeper into some of the tools within the application.
How to Use Click Attribution To Measure Your Social Marketing Traffic Sources
A great tool within Google Analytics for measuring social media metrics is the click attribution tool. This handy feature shows the consumer journey through a website and assigns value to the referral sites consumers are using to get to your site. Knowing this information will show you your audience behaviors. According to Adam Singer at Google, this important because,
“At Google Analytics we’re finding that on average customers interact with a brand 4.3 times over a two-day period before they finally make a purchase. Social may account for an earlier interaction as it is often an upper-funnel player in the buyer journey.”
With social media, your users will most likely be referred by your social accounts to your website. In this case, you can use your analytics to see whether users are visiting your website through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or any other social platform.
After you’ve discovered your best source – let’s say Facebook – Google Analytics will assign more value to that channel. If the value is high, this tells you that Facebook is an extremely valuable platform for your brand and tactics on that channel should continue.
Contrarily, if you see low referrals from Twitter, then you know that the platform either isn’t useful for your company or you need to change your approach on that channel. With the click attribution tool, you may assign a value to each channel so you can discern where to apply your dollars.
How to Engage Your Social Followers With Audience Engagement
The audience engagement social media metric tells you how long users are staying on a given Web page, before moving on to the next. Are your Facebook visitors bouncing quickly, or are they staying around to further know the brand by clicking on more pages?
You can track your posts to see which ones are converting best. Are contests gaining a lot of traction, are whitepapers the way to go or is it something in the middle? With this metric, you’ll be able to measure how effective your content is at drawing your audience in. Take a look at your bounce rate to tell when someone is leaving a page without completing an action. Those pages should be modified.
You want the visitor to engage with your brand, so this is also a perfect place to include and test CTA’s (calls to action). Call to action psychology is a tricky thing, getting it right can be hard – but its doable with calculated measurements and goals.
What matters when crafting effective CTA’s is harnessing the power of storytelling. Connecting with the consumer will motivate them to take action. The button doesn’t make them convert, your services do. The button just leads them down the right path.
To test this, simply A/B test different pages with different phrasing. Over a few weeks, you will see definitive results to let you know which social media CTAs are engaging your audience, and which aren’t.
How To Set Goals and Track Goals In Your Sales Funnel
Within the funnel visualization tool, you can measure the effectiveness of your social media strategy by setting and tracking goals. In a social marketing agency, the resources are available to test and maneuver around funnel blockage, but if you run a small business or have limited resources, it’s tough to find the underlying data to support your tactics.
To help, you can set up goals. Establishing goals helps you build a standardized path from social media referral to product purchase. How do you want users to interact with a certain CTA or image? With analytics, you can track how the audience is engaging with the elements on your website and assign a goal value.
The value tells you where you should be spending your marketing budget. If you’re set up a goal to track a Facebook contest, now you’re able to see who is visiting you through the platform and how they are responding to content, incentives, etc.
This process also tells you where visitors are falling out of your funnel. If you deal in ecommerce, they could be dropping out at the shipping page or shopping cart. If they are dropping off directly before a purchase, you know that something is wrong with the shopping cart page. Conversely, if the social media metrics show that they are mostly exiting the funnel at the receipt page, then your funnel is converting.
This gives you visual representation of which people entered at which step of your funnel as well as who dropped out and when. It gives you clear numbers as to the percentages of people converting or not converting. Very useful when improving your social media marketing strategy.