9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 5 - How Will You Measure Success?

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 5 - How Will You Measure Success? 

Before we answer HOW to measure, we need to answer WHY we measure.  We measure first to ensure our efforts are meeting our online marketing goals, and second we measure to continuously improve our efforts. 

Before beginning measuring, you want to know what you are measuring, here is where we refer back to Step 1: Purpose. We want to have what you are measuring strategically align with the your online marketing goals we set out earlier. For example, if one of your online marketing goals was to be known as an expert in your industry, you could measure how many retweets and shares you've had from industry giants. What is the reasoning behind measuring this? Well, All social media posts should be written to achieve this goal. Some will be shared, retweeted and covered by identified giants. This works to achieve our overall goal of becoming a go-to person for our industry.

Image Source:
http://www.clipartpanda.com/clipart_images/ruler-5080306

Make sure your chosen metric for measuring your success is indeed measurable! Therefore, you need to understand what can be measured, and then list those you will track to measure your success. A “clicked on” in your eNewsletters, Facebook pages, websites, online ads, and landing pages can also be tracked. You can change one word on a post or heading of a blog to see if it is then clicked on more or less often. 

Call to Action (CTA) 

Whatever online presences you chose, once you have your targets’ eyes on any one online materials; your post, online ad, website, business link, or eNewsletter, in just a few seconds your target audience needs to know what action you’d like them to take, otherwise you will lose their attention and waste the opportunity. 

For example, if you wanted your clients to buy tickets to an event, you'd want to have your client be able to identify what you want them to do, and be able to find the link to the tickets very easily, as people online have extremely short attention spans. Knowing what you want them to do makes it possible for you to measure your online success.

Having a clear and intriguing CTA is a good practise in decreasing your bounce rate. 

2 Critical Elements to Measuring your Online Marketing 

When measuring your online marketing efforts, there are two key variables you want to keep in mind. These two elements are your website traffic and the engagement of your efforts. You want to keep those two variables in mind when measuring your online marketing efforts. 

An easy way of tracking your website traffic is through a tool called Google Analytics. Make sure before setting up your Google Analytics account that you use an email that identifies with the company or organization, not your personal email. After getting set up, Google Analytics will generate a code for you to place in your search engine optimization account settings area. After completing that step, analytics will begin to work within 48 hours, and you will be able to view all of Google's analytics reports. When analyzing website or blog traffic, a few key measures you will want to look at include: number of unique visitors, average amount of time on the website, and traffic sources (where your web traffic came from). 

When considering the engagement of your online marketing efforts, you want to know what exactly you are using to measure your success. A few great examples of elements you could measure are an increase in quality followers, increase in clicking on links back to your website, increase in number of visitors, or downloading your app. Once you have recognized what you are going to use to measure your success, you can then use various tools to help measure these elements. One great tool that will help is Klout. Klout measures your online marketing efforts across the various social media platforms you allow it, and it gives you a score out of 100. It measure your engagement, likes, comments and overall post quality. You want to aim to have a score of at least above 50. 

Now that you have the tools to begin measuring your success, try it out! 

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 4 - Choosing Your Social Platform

Choosing Your Social Platform

Source of Social Media Demographics:
http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-media-user-demographics_b38095

Which social media platforms is your target market is using? What sorts of content you will be posting. Which platform is best suited for the type of materials you have. Where do you currently see the type of engagement you'd like to initiate with your target audience?   

As we've always said, you do not have to choose every social media platform for you company. Just those where your target market is most likely to engage with you. Think of each additional platform as an additional place to engage your current and potential clients. 

Facebook Profile

• Meant for a human, not a company or organization. Facebook will convert your Profile to a Business Page if you are not a human. 
• Humans become your "friends".  You can limit what people see on your Profile. You approve new friends. You can even limit what friends; categorize friends into different lists who “see” more or less information about you, or who see different posts.
• You can have humans subscribe to you (vs. becoming your friends). This means you do not see their updates; they just see your public posts. Celebrities like this feature.
• You can have a maximum of 5,000 friends on a Profile account.

Remember! You must have a Facebook
profile to create a Facebook page!

Facebook Page

• Businesses or Organizations should not have a Profile account, but indeed a Business Page. 
• There are two ways to manage Business Pages. First as a Human profile who is an administrator on a Page, or second, as a Business Manager. In both cases there are various levels of administrators' access.   A Business Page can have multiple people assigned as administrators. They can post as the page, without their identity being revealed. They sign in through their own human profile account and then switch to use Facebook as the Page, or they sign in directly through the Business Manager account to the Page. Business Manager accounts are relatively new to Facebook, to find out more click here.
• Unlimited human profiles and business pages can "Like" your Business Page.
• Insights and reports are available to the administrators of your Facebook Page. These insights include statistics on who and how many likes you have, which posts are most engaging, how old and what gender your page’s fan base is, whom your page reaches and more. Insights are free to the Business Page and very valuable. 
• Pages are indexed by Google.
• Boosted Posts - a Page can pay for its posts to be redistributed to a target audience, regardless if your target human has Liked your Page or not. Boosts can be purchased for $1/day. You can target a different audience each boost or the same audience. Boosts have proven to be very effective. 
• You can Promote a Business Page to increase the number of Likes connected to your Page.
• Facebook started suppressing the distribution of Business Page.  Only about 5-10% of those who "Like" your Page are sent Page Posts to their Newsfeed.  This is why Post engagement and Boosting Posts are critical to increase your Posts' reach. A business can only be effective on Facebook when they master how to engage their audience and Boost their Posts on Facebook. 
• Remember, people are on Facebook to reconnect with friends and for entertainment. 

LinkedIn  

• LinkedIn Profiles are indexed by Google.
• There are many quality groups on LinkedIn to join; some are closed and others are open.
• There are 259 million business professionals on LinkedIn.
• You can Post from your Profile, but the posts are not stored on your Profile like on Facebook or Twitter. Instead when someone visits your LinkedIn Profile, they indeed only see your Profile, they do not see any of your Posts. Posts are sent to the newsfeed of all of you connections.
• People come to LinkedIn to Network and read Industry News. 
• You can add a Company Page to LinkedIn.
• You can Post from our Company Page. Posts from your Company Page, like those on Facebook, are there when someone comes to visit your company page. They can see both your company's information and your company's posts. This is an excellent way to share your thought leadership. 
• Only Profiles can join Groups.
• Since historic Posts are not captured on your LinkedIn Profile and only captured on your LinkedIn Company Page, I suggest strongly that you create a LinkedIn Company Page, post there first and then share that to your LinkedIn Profile. Otherwise you loose your archive of brilliance. 
• The average age on LinkedIn is 48 years.
• If a "C" level executive is going to be on any Social Media, they are going to be on LinkedIn.

Twitter  

• Twitter profiles are indexed by Google.
• It is recommended that you customize your header and use your company’s logo as your Twitter Profile photo. 
• The average age on Twitter is 24 years.
• People generally follow retailers for:
• 68% to find out about discounts
• 55% to find out about upcoming deal. 
• 45% follow to show support
• One email drives one Twitter account. Unlike Facebook, your one Human Profile can indeed create multiple Facebook Business Pages. 

YouTube Channels

• Videos uploaded to YouTube are indexed by Google.
• It is recommended that you customize your YouTube Channel background to match your branding and use your company’s logo as your YouTube Channel Profile photo.
• The rate that people are consuming video online is increasing rapidly.

Pinterest

• Pinning photos from your blog or website is an excellent way to get traffic back to your blog or website.
• 80% of the people using Pinterest are women.
• We are on Pinterest to share or collect ideas onto a virtual board! Some of the top interests on Pinterest are cooking, design, travel, and decorating. 

Each platform must be optimized. In brief, this means to add:

• Keywords
• Consistent Logos
• Consistent Descriptions
• Website Addresses

The last thing to think about is selecting your unique social media address on each platform. Why? To make it easier for your followers to find you.   Whenever you create an account on any of the social media platforms, you can create a unique address that will link directly to your profile. 

Here is a chart, summarizing what I mean by the unique addresses you create on each platform. All behave the same, in that they are all first come first serve. 

Social Media Platform	Unique Addresses	Note
Twitter	www.Twitter.com/YourUsername @YourUsername	Refer to as your handle (Mine is @SofieAndreou)
Facebook Page	www.Facebook.com/UniqueName	Cannot change it once you save it. Sometimes you can't create one until after you have 25 "Likes"
YouTube	www.YouTube.com/Username	It's tough to change this Username, careful.
LinkedIn	www.LinkedIn.com/in/UniqueName
LinkedIn Company	www.LinkedIn.com/Compamy/UniqueName
Pinterest	www.Pinterest/Username

It's effective when you are able secure the same Username or unique URL on each of your Company Social Media accounts.  It's first come first serve, so, you will need to be creative.

Why is it effective? For both SEO and for your printed marketing materials. Both making it easy for your target market to find you. Here are mine www.Facebook.com/SofieAndreouSeminars and www.Twitter.com/SofieAndreou, www.Pinterest.com/SofieAndreou, https://www.youtube.com/user/SofieAndreouSeminars.

This was a summary of Step 4 .. stay tuned for Step 5! 

9 Steps to Your Social Strategy: Step 9 - Create Your Calendar!

Creating and Managing your Social Media Calendar

To complete your Social Strategy, you will need a marketing calendar. In this post, I'll focus on Social Media Calendar tactics. I recommend to my clients' that they merge their traditional and online marketing calendars.  

Your Social Media Calendar is most effective when it highlights both the efforts and measures to be tracked. This becomes your both your Online Marketing Plan and Schedule. Initially, it can be developed for one test department or event and then rolled out through your appropriate departments. 

The approach is unique for each company. Modified depending on the level of social engagement and content sources. A social media Coordinator oversees the implementation and measures for the entire organization.  Many companies now have mini Social Media Coordinators or Contributors in appropriate departments. Contributors have other job responsibilities, however, looking for Social Media content simply becomes a part of their specific job responsibilities in a Social Company.

In a Social Company, looking for Social Media content becomes a part of specific identified people's job responsibilities.  These people are called Social Contributors. The Contributors might also post directly to social media or just send their materials to the Social Coordinator.  Either way photos and videos must be captured and posted in an authentic and timely fashion. 

Ideally, social plans and goals should to be automated, such that alerts and reminders are sent to the Contributors and Coordinators. We suggest using your existing organizational calendar system, versus a separate one if possible. It is easier to sustain when you are not introducing new systems or processes for people to follow. 

Of course, for the posting tactics and measurement reports, you'll want to use one of the Social Media management tools we reviewed in earlier blogs. There are many different tools to choose from. Each aimed at different organizational teams structures and sizes. These tools produce a calendar of future posts aimed at helping the Coordinator to see where their gaps are. The Coordinator can, right from some of these tools, send out material requests to the Contributors.

The schedule should capture, at the minimum

(i)            What the goal  & measure of success will be..

(ii)           What topic they will post or gather materials on and where they will get their material.

(iii)          How often they will post or gather materials.
(iv)       Who the Contributor is who own's gathering this content. 

Here is a great example of a social media schedule to get you started in the right direction.

Who	Topic	Frequency	When	Goal/Measure
Chef	Food	Twice a week	Thurs & Fridays at 10am	Goal: "Butts" in seats. Measures: Engagement of the food photos. & Reservations
Sports Director	Team Group Fitness Activities	Twice a week	Tues &Weds at 10AM	Goal: Awareness & Increased Bookings. Measures: Sharing of the Activity Photos & Request for group activities
Spa Manager	Spa Treatments	Daily	Monday to Fridays at 2pm	Goal: Awareness & Increased Bookings. Measures: Sharing of the Spa Photos. & Reservations for Spa Treatments
Wedding Coordinator	Wedding Excellence	Twice a week	Twice on Weekends	Goal: Awareness & Increased Bookings. Measures: Sharing of the Wedding Photos. & An increase in Wedding Packages Enquirers
Social Media  Coordinator	Specials	Once a week	Thursdays  at 2:30pm	Goal: Boost weekend reservations: Measures: Reservations Clicks

Always remember the posting tips we spoke of in earlier posts.  Each target market and Social Media platform has it's own set of thresholds and approaches. They are each different.   Apply the appropriate posting best practices to each of your specific social platforms! Spread your posts out appropriately. Be entertaining and educational! Be real.