Author: Bob Press (TAP Financial Partners)

You’ve taken the time to identify which of the social media platforms are the best fit for your company and created and implemented posting strategies to help reach target audiences. But that’s only half the battle. What’s equally important is monitoring and measuring the impact of the effort to determine what’s working, what’s not, and to what extent you are inspiring individuals to do more than scroll by.

Here are five indicators that can quantitatively judge social media success or failure:

1. Increase in followers

Your opt-in audiences may have started with just friends and family members, but if you’re creating unique content that speaks to a specific audience, your community should continue to grow organically as more people are exposed to what you’re offering.

2. Audience engagement

While follower metrics can tell you some things, they don’t paint the whole picture. For example, 1,000 followers who never read your posts are less valuable than 100 that actively engage with your page by commenting, sharing posts with their network, or clicking on links that connect to your website.

You can measure engagement by adding up a post’s likes, comments, and shares, then dividing that by your total number of followers. Then, multiply that number by 100 to get your engagement rate percentage.

3. Conversion rate

If the primary goal of your social media strategy is to drive traffic to the company website, Google Analytics can tell you how many people land on the site from your social media pages (and what pages they click on once there). Experiment with different types of social posts to determine which types generate more website traffic.

4. Long-term growth

There is no overnight success in social media and effectively marketing your organization in this way takes time. The good news is it does produce actual data that can be tracked month to month or year over year to determine whether your strategy is effectively getting new followers’ attention. If you see a decline in followers, it’s time to make some changes; if you keep adding new followers, you’re on the right track.

5. Sales

If your social media pages are designed to lead directly to product or service sales,  you can track this by creating UTM URLs that identify which campaigns bring traffic to your sales team.

Keeping up with your social media strategy is time-consuming, which is why it’s so important to make sure it’s working for you. While it’s just one tactic your small business can use, it is growing in importance as connectivity between potential customers increases.

Business growth is one of the guiding principles TAP Financial Partners brings to its ecosystem of clients. Contact us today to see how we can give your business the tools, resources, and backing it needs to get to the next level.