There can be little or no doubt that with the help of social media, you can enlarge your audience, become more visible, and gain further exposure for your company/products/services. By judiciously using social media, you can provide reliable customer service, and generate fresh leads and increase sales.
Many small business owners are still reluctant to invest in social media marketing campaign because they are unsure how to measure and diffident of seeing social media Return on Investment (ROI) in favorable light.
Measuring social media success for your business is not as intimidating as you may fear. Infect, there are different ways to measure social media marketing success and ascertain how this is impacting your business.
Community Growth & Sustainability – This is the standard social media metric though it is not easily quantifiable as regards business growth and sales increase.
Social media measurement can be done with noting the increase in likes, +1s, favorites, repins, retweets etc. This means your followers are looking and reading your content. This is a good start, and it is an important metric to measure.
Engagement, Shares, Comments – Engagement takes place when those first likes, +1s, retweets and favorites write comments and share information.
These are important metrics and indicators that your efforts are succeeding.
Twitter Stats, for instance, show a number of stats, including the mentions, follows, and unfollows, along with stats for each individual Tweet. There are also free tools for monitoring mentions of your brand/company across the web – Topsy, SocialMention etc.
Social media referral traffic and visitor increase to your Website are measurable indicators that your SMM efforts are succeeding and paying dividends. Tracking the number of website traffic and conversions that come from your social media channels using Google analytics is a very reliable method of measuring your social-media marketing success.
This is one of the best ways to measure social media is through email collection. You can easily place a “Subscribe” tab on your Facebook page that ties back to your email service like Constant Contact or MailChimp.
Small businesses can use CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software (like Infusionsoft, Salesforce and Hubspot) for tracking and managing sales and marketing. They will then appreciate the direct increase in sales for the specific products or services they post about on social media.
While someone who follows you online may not currently need your service or product at the moment, they may know someone who does and refer your business to them. Small businesses will start getting regular referrals and word-of-mouth sales due to their social media presence and this can boost revenue.