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Top Social Media Metrics for Measuring your Social Media Efforts
Every business knows the importance of adopting social media in their digital marketing efforts because social media presence has become quite critical today. And, also it is quite overwhelming to have this presence. You may be trying your level best to generate and share good content, interact with visitors and customers, and try to make sense of it. But the biggest question you need to answer is whether your efforts are giving you good rewards or not.
If you are just concentrating on your fans or followers, you are seriously missing out on important insights. If you seriously want to evaluate the results of your social media efforts, it is crucial to track the right social media metrics. Social media metrics play a vital role and can be your window through which you can peep into the interests, desires and annoyance of your customers. These metrics give you an insight about the overall behaviour of your visitors, prospects and customers. If you do a comprehensive analysis of these metrics, they will fuel insights to your overall digital marketing plan.
What are the important social media metrics you should be measuring?
Let’s discuss about some major social media metrics you should be measuring.
Volume
The first, easiest, and most important metric you need to measure is the volume. By volume, we mean here size. What is the size of the conversation about your trade name? Capacity is the great indicator of interest. You will notice people tend to talk more about things they love or hate. Count the number of messages you get for your brand and the number of people who talk about your brand. You should track how these numbers change with time. Let us take an example here. Facebook insights have a very useful metric. It is a metric called “people talking about this”. These metric measures how many people posted on their walls about your brand. You should analyse when the volume or capacity is higher. You can use this information for circulation of messages during time when the volume is higher. This will give you more engagement.
Reach
Reach is also a very crucial social media metric. It measures the spread of social media conversation. Reach can help you measure the intensity of your content. You will come to know how far your content disseminating. You will also get the actual size of your audience for your message. It gives you the exact figure of potential audience size. An important action such as clicks, retweets, or replies help in calculating the reach metric. But, remember, reach becomes more powerful when compared to other engagement metrics.
Engagement
Engagement is also considered an important area for measuring the effectiveness of applied social media plan. Engagement metric lets you know how people are participating in the conversation or how they are spreading your message or engaging with topics you post. Activities on your posts like comments, tweets, replies and likes are helpful in gazing who all is taking active part in your content and, ultimately your brand. Pay attention to posts and messages that generate more user engagement.
Influence
Influence is another social media metric which lets you measure the results of your social media efforts. You need to find out who is talking about your brand and what they are talking. There are a number of tools which measure the social media metric, influence. And, all of them measure in a different manner. Keep in mind, audience size has nothing to do with influence. Looking at the influence metric, you can plan who to reach out to when you are preparing for a campaign.
Share of voice
How well you are doing on social media? You need to consider share of voice metric to measure this. You need to find out how conversations about your brand relate to conversations taking place in your industry. You should try to find out how your competitors are doing on social media. Try to find out what is making them successful in this online platform. It is easy to find the conversations on social media as they are public. You can measure your competitors’ results as easily as you can measure your results.
Paying attention to your social media metrics is crucial
Your social media metrics give you insight about the behaviour of your customers. The three important applications of your social media metrics are customer service, consumer experience and demographic insights. Although a recent survey indicated social media to be the least popular way for customer care, but still you will find customers interacting with their service providers through different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and GooglePlus. They prefer social media medium when their initial queries are not solved via email or phone.
Next, talking about consumer experience. Your social media metrics gives you a real time analysis of what engages your customers the most. This real-time view can help you in improving customer experience. The social media metrics also give you an insight about the demographics. You will get information about the demographic information of your customers, about their interests, genders, ages and profession.
Hope you enjoyed reading the post! Concentrate on the above social media metrics if you want to measure your social media efforts seriously.
Derek is Social Media Manager at Home Strategic – Isle of Man
30 Sec Twitter Consumer Video – An Important Milestone for Twitter
Are you prepared to see more video in your Twitter stream?
Twitter, a renowned name in social media has launched a new consumer video product. The video product allows users to record, make changes, and add tweet video clips directly through the app. Videos taken within the app or uploaded from the camera roll will have a 30 second time limit analogous to Vine’s 6 second limit or 140 -character limit for tweets. There is a possibility that the new video service of Twitter will compete Vine, though Twitter says it is dedicated to both the products.
According to Twitter, the new video service is a new way to capture videos and have private conversations between small groups. It is a service designed to entice users, and keep them engaged for long. The service will be easier to use during news events like protests. It will also work on the company’s bonding with the users of Vine. Twitter has designed the new video service with the aim to make Twitter app stickier with users. And, it makes more than just looking at the tweets.
Twitter understands the importance of a video. Findings show more than 60% of consumers spend at least two minutes watching a video that educates them about the products they want to buy. Video is an effective story teller which keeps the users engaged. Every digital marketing player believes in the magic of video. So does the Twitter. The company believes it will drive more user engagement. If the users are able to create and consume videos within their timeline, they will be keener in checking the apps more regularly. The feature will also help Twitter’s video advertising efforts as the users will get more accustomed to videos in their streams.
As Twitter expands its video efforts, it is deemed to have more data on which the users watch most of the content. Introduction of consumer video also carries importance to its product, Vine. Vine has served as a single video offering for regular users. The new tool of Twitter has a number of striking similarities.
The consumer video allows users to capture videos in parts. Also, you can edit or rearrange them exactly in the same way you can edit Vine videos. Both of these products, Vine and Twitter, play within Twitter’s timeline.
Jinen Kamdar, the product director at Twitter says – Twitter video is not a threat to Vine. And, the two products have different audiences. On one side, Vine is for short-form entertainment. And, Twitter videos will give more benefits to use cases like breaking news and events.
Derek is Social Media Manager at Home Strategic – Isle of Man
Facebook’s Audience Network for enhanced mobile targeting and dynamic customization
Facebook, the social media giant has already made a niche in the mobile advertisement ecosystem. There are several factors working in the favour of Facebook. Some of the top factors include its reach among avid social users, engagement and the captive audience. Facebook has no intentions or plans to stop the momentum it has gained till date. To add more, it unveiled its new venture, Audience Network at the F8 developer’s conference in San Francisco. It is a new feather in Facebook’s cap as the tool serves ads to third-party mobile apps.
The Facebook Audience Network project allows existing advertisers on Facebook to have their advertisements placed at the top of the mobile screen or in another apps outside the social media platform. Audience Network is more beneficial for marketers who know the importance of mobile marketing.
How Facebook Audience Network will play a major role in the mobile ad world?
The Audience Network on Facebook has the potential to execute against the integrated formats and personalized targeting needed for mobile ads to do succeed. It offers an option for a better ad format experience. We know customers do not love the standard ads offered to them anymore. They are always in search of something that is more customized and impressive. Facebook announced it will allow developers and publishers to offer customizable native ad formats to be filled through the network. This will help in boosting the mobile user ad experience, and witness good results. Also, the advertisers can dip into Facebook’s rich affinity data to target their ads across other mobile properties Audience Network also has a dramatic effect on the segment of paid marketing. It is a good plan to help monetize on mobile. It is a very simple way to extend Facebook advertising purchases across mobile apps. What is the best part of Audience Network is it letting advertisers contact anyone with a Facebook account even when they are not on Facebook.
What are the best ways to utilize Facebook Audience Network?
#1 Use right messages for the audience to see on mobile
It is important to put the right message for the audience. This will lead to more engagement on mobile as mobile touches are more effective than desktop messages. For maximum engagement, the videos should not be more than 15-20 seconds as users start losing interest if the videos are too long. On top of that, you also have the option of retarget as it allows you to check who watched your video and for how long.
#2Use Facebook’s cross-device reporting for more effectiveness
You will find many users who view the ads on mobile, but finalize the purchase on their desktop. But, it is really difficult to track these type of users. Facebook’s cross-device reporting is a good tool that lets you track which device users saw the message on, and on which device they finally made the purchase. The main aim behind using this tool is to track whether your ads had an impression or a click. It also has the potential to check the traffic that initiated from a mobile, but got converted on a desktop.
#3 Use mobile ads as a serving hand
Today, there are is increasing number of mobile users worldwide, but still many use desktops to make the purchase. Use Facebook mobile ads as a helping hand in desktop conversion. As the number of users on mobile phones, mobile ads can be the starting point and an indirect source of conversion to sales. This will really help when most of the conversion takes place on desktops.
#4 Make use of impressive ads
Your apps can have access to several of advertiser base. So, make sure you display ads that are of high quality and in a format that is right for you. You should be abreast with the right tactics of mobile advertisement. You should plan out more advertisement tactics in order to get the most out of the Audience Network.
Facebook’s Audience Network brings a lot of opportunity for marketers who want to get the most out their mobile marketing strategies. You can also be one of them if you want to take advantage of custom ad formats to reduce disruption. Facebook has launched Audience Network with the aim to improve relevancy of ads people view, provide greater reach for the advertisers and help developers monetize their apps.
Know what ROI means to you before using Social Media
Social media, which was once considered as a passing craze, has quickly been integrated into the core of digital marketing. But, in spite of that, today, you will come across many who say it does not help in making money. The saying is totally a myth. There are many successfully digital marketers who are making good money out of their social media marketing efforts. If you are not able to make money, you are going somewhere wrong. You strategy is wrong and you’re not using the channels properly.
Just think about these social media sites – Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. These sites are counted as largest sites offering robust ways to reach potential audience and convert them into buyers, influencing the bottom line.
What is important here to note is how to use the medium. How should you account ROI in social media? How much does integrating other digital marketing strategies in social media will benefit to yield more ROI? These questions will help you find out right ways to use social media channels for your benefit.
Set realistic goals and define how you will calculate ROI
Settings up realistic goals and defining how you will calculate ROI is of utmost important. You need to define the results to measure metrics. You need to strategize effectively to establish relevant conversations with your fans, followers and customers. You will need to find out how much you will spend on your social media marketing efforts and compare that with the results you get.
Customized content for different platforms
The buying behaviour of consumers keeps on evolving. Today, social mostly resides on smartphones. More customers are interested to watch catchy short videos carrying strong messages. So, you need to take into account how your content is to be viewed. Buyers today want to research more before making a purchase. You need to find how your content is going to be viewed. The trend is viewing of short-form videos on the likes of Instagram & Vine mostly user-generated content. They are highly beneficial outlets for customer engagement. Your social strategies will give you good ROI if you know how to use content on different channels. Use top channels and use videos, images and other content formats to engage your audience, and turn them into prospects.
Develop healthy conversations with your fans and customers
Social media is NOT just about selling. Use it to establish healthy conversation with your fans and customers. Listen first before you jump in. You should keep yourself up to date about the activities of your followers and customers. Not only with your audiences and customers, engage in communities related to your industry and be active.
So, if you really want a high ROI from your Social Media efforts, make sure you have a budget. Know what ROI means to you and take measures accordingly. Make sure you have a strategy but be ready to adapt to the ever changing landscape of Social.
Image courtesy of StockFresh
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