Lessons in measuring social media success from Hubspot webinar

Almost every business has a presence on social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter, but how can they be sure their time spent engaging with this audience is spent effectively?

Marketing and social media experts Amber Naslund, Jay Baer, Jason Keath and Maggie Georgeva made some excellent points about the subject in a webinar arranged by Hubspot on April 19th, so we thought we'd share the highlights to see if you can make the most of your time spent social networking. 

Counting the number of followers on Twitter and 'likes' on Facebook you have might appear to be a great way of measuring success on the surface, but we have discovered there is more to social networking than building up a massive following.

You must think about what you want to achieve from your social networking activity and how this contributes to your overall business objectives, do you want to increase traffic to your website, boost the sales of your products or services or become a thought leader in your industry? Knowing this will help you focus on what aspects to measure.

Once you have decided on what you want to achieve throughout your ongoing social media marketing strategy you must think about how to measure its progress and eventual success. 

Look at the behaviour of your social media audience, the number of followers or likes is irrelevant if none of them are clicking through to your website, making purchases or helping you spread content to a wider group. 

Tracking the click-throughs from your social networking activity is a good place to start. It will give you an idea of how the content you are supplying is engaging your audience and could provide important sales intelligence data, as well as create potential leads for follow-up calls, emails or other marketing techniques. 

Once you have collated data about who is following your social networking activity and how they are engaging with the information, it's time to think about the next moves. How can you use the information to encourage those people to buy, or sign up to your ongoing services?

Reach your potential customer on every available level - try to find your Twitter followers on Facebook and invite them to subscribe to your mailing list for example so you can engage with them directly. 

Although social media may appear free on the surface, remember that time is money! Be aware of how much time you are spending on measuring the success of your social media strategy, think about the cost of the hours used and the resources taken away from other areas of your business.

You could use free-of-charge tools such as Google Analytics to help measure your success and discover the ways in which people are interacting with your posts and website.

Are you using a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising service? How much does each click-through cost? You could calculate the website traffic generated from social networking content and put a monetary value on how much they would cost if they were PPC leads.

Remember that the big picture is the most important when it comes to measuring the success of your social media strategy, it is an ongoing activity and you must avoid trying to measure success over the space of a few months or a flurry of likes on Facebook. 

Look at your customer loyalty and repeat business, is this being boosted by your social networking activity or can it be nurtured by following up with an engaging Twitter conversation?

Think about the content you are creating for your social media websites, interesting content is vital and extremely valuable, regardless of who is sharing it or engaging with your posts. 

There is no exact science to measuring the success of your social media strategy and although there are tools and software you can download to track followers, likes and what your fans are saying about your business, it may take some time before you see this activity translate into sales and boosted profits. 

But we at Boxed Red believe creating valuable and interesting content for your customers is a great reason to engage with social media. You should enjoy it for the benefits it brings and dedicate some time and resources to ensuring each post adds as much value as possible and that your long-term efforts benefit your business. 

However, social media activity is best used as part of an integrated marketing strategy that reaches your target audience on many different levels and with appropriate messages about how you they can engage with your business. 

Join in with the conversation about the Hubspot webinar on Twitter using the hashtag #bizmetrics