When it comes to social media marketing as a source of traffic it is more subtle and less easy to measure. However, as with all internet marketing it’s essential to build up data and track results. With this in mind here are tips on how to track this method of marketing:
Social media metrics
In SMM there is a range of metrics that can be of interest:
Traffic – how many visitors to your site can be attributed to social media marketing?
Followers and fans – on each social network how many people are linked to your profile and is that number on the increase?
Social interaction – how do these people interact with you? Are they sharing and re-sharing your content across your chosen networks?
Performance of content – does the content you publish inspire interaction?
In order to get the data to answer some of these questions you need to segment according to social networking site. There won’t always be direct answers to your questions so in some cases you’ll need to draw conclusions based on some of the data.
Looking at Facebook
There is a huge amount of data available via Facebook and many of the metrics highlighted above can be ascertained using their brand pages product, Facebook Insights. This allows you to track your metric over a certain timespan and to assess the volume of fans, the effectiveness of social content and the amount of shares and likes attributed to content. You can also look at fan demographics which can be useful for local businesses.
One of the most interesting features is that it can be integrated into your site. Facebook Insights can be easily embedded into the site displaying all useful information about your Facebook users.
Using Twitter
Twitter and Facebook are the most popular of the social networks and are most likely to attract lots of referring traffic. However, unlike Facebook, Twitter does not have a built-in analytics system. This makes tracking metrics over time difficult without other tools.
You will need to look at the number of followers and whether the volume is growing. You should also look at active followers. These are people who have logged on within the past 30 days or have used a Twitter feature. To get this you’ll need to employ extra software.
Other metric include the @replies which is the number of Tweets that have been sent to your account name; @mentions which are Tweets using the account name but within the Tweet – this means other people who do not follow the account can see it; brand mentions which are Tweets that use the account or brand name without @, URL and domain mentions which are tweets showing a link which also includes shortened URLs, retweets, Vias and RTs.
Also look at the top performers in content terms – looking at the amount of retweets, clicks and shares. Again you’ll need third party data for this.
At Searchengineoptimization.co.uk we offer professional help with all aspects of social media marketing ensuring your business achieves its internet marketing goals.