you have an idea who your buyer is you figured out what channels to use and
you've started posting on your social media channels but how do you know of
what you're doing is working are you posting the right content is your
audience responding is there a return on investment or ROI in your social
campaigns or are you even investing in the right things that's where social
metrics come in let's start by learning how to look at all of your data as a
whole and to set up benchmarks for future reporting you'll want to conduct
a social media audit a hard look at the data from all your social accounts and
the social conversations about your brand and your competitors conducting a
social media audit will help you develop or adjust a social media strategy that
aligns to specific actionable business objectives and goals to discover trends
you can use to create or modify social media campaigns receive valuable insight
into customer sentiment and perception of your brand provide executives and
your team I look into what is or is not working so you can manage and justify
social media spend an audit gives you the opportunity to see the ebb and flow
of your audience engagement content performance and what's working and
what's not it's a way for you to put your thumb on the pulse of everything
you're doing in social as part of your audit you're going to be looking at a
whole bunch of data there are a variety of ways to record all this information
but many social media managers find that developing a tabbed spreadsheet is the
way to go it will be helpful if you have a social analytics tool such as net base
Sysomos crimson hexagon or another type of metrics tool that you can aggregate
your data but if not you can manually pull the data and compile it from each
channels social media metrics some of these metrics are easy to acquire by
going to the social networks themselves Facebook has business insights and
Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Instagram and YouTube all have analytics you can
explore if you use the HubSpot social tools you can use reports to analyze
some of what is needed namely your social website traffic
and your content post data if you are just starting out with social media you
might not need to conduct an audit yet but understanding what goes into an
audit will help you set up a framework that can help you capture much of this
data on a weekly or monthly basis which will save you time in the long run let's
dig in the metrics you need can be found in a variety of places whether it's in
Google Analytics on the social networks main pages or within the account in the
analytics sections for each channel a spreadsheet can help you keep track of
all this information note that the metrics for each social
media channel will be slightly different based on the available numbers you can
measure but there are a few commonalities you should look at you'll
want to start by listing your own channels those social handles that your
company owns the bigger your business the more likely you are to have many
channels then lists who the internal owners of the channels are and who has
the passwords or who has been granted access this will help you know if you
need additional governance for your channels for example are there people
who have access to Facebook who no longer should also record how many
followers you have on your official social channels you'll want to keep
track of this metric moving forward next you might want to explore your non owned
channels and followers are their channels that are illegally using your
assets and logos and potentially taking a share of your followers are their fan
channels that are co-opting your branding should you consider filing
takedown notices for some of these channels or find better ways to interact
with those accounts if there are channels that are co-opting your logo
name or other brand visuals you can report them to the individual network
for removal then consider the profiles for each channel do all your social
channels have a similar look and feel does your profile imagery such as your
covers icons and avatars adhere to your company brand guidelines is your tone
and voice consist across the channels let's move on to
content performance this is a big one and you'll want to analyze each channel
individually afterward you can also use this data to determine if some of that
content might resonate differently or better in other channels some of the
metrics you should track include best and worst performing posts posts with
the most engagement things like comments and likes post frequency what types of
content have the best and worst performance the published time of posts
that have the best engagement video views click-through to content post
reach and impressions number of Twitter mentions effective keywords response
rate are you responding in a timely manner sentiment note that some tools
enable you to measure positive and negative sentiment don't forget about
advertising if you're doing a lot of social media advertising you might want
to conduct a separate in-depth audit using the analytics and the ad tools
found within the networks where your advertising you'll want to track similar
metrics to the above for content performance but also look at budgets ROI
a be test results in areas for opportunity you'll also want to analyze
your competition go to each of your competitors social media channels and
take a look at how they use their networks
how are your competitors using social media how many followers do they have
compared to you how is their content performing what types of content perform
the best how do they engage with their followers by examining the competition
you can get a sense of how you stack up but also where you might have gaps that
you need to close seeing all of this information in one place is a powerful
way to analyze the effectiveness of your content in your tactics you can identify
weaknesses in your approach determine what is working well so you can do more
of the same stop ineffective programs or understand
if you need more resources to do a better job even better now you have the
metrics you need to argue for those additional resources conducting an audit
might take some time but the value it will provide can help you do a few
different things develop new benchmarks and KPIs determine the best mix of
content on the right channel at the right times identify opportunities to
better engage with customers adjust budgets and calculate ROI identify how
you need to make resource changes to boost social media efforts be prepared
to conduct an audit of this depth every 12 to 18 months at minimum more often if
you don't have strong metrics you regularly track with the rapidly
changing social media landscape you'll want to always have an eye on how your
efforts are making an impact now step back and take a look at this overall
audit consider your buyer persona and your business goals what are the metrics
your executives will care about most pull those details out and prepare a
shorter more condensed version that you can deliver on a weekly or monthly basis
there you have it all the basics of measuring your social media a step that
can be a game-changer for your business
you