Are you getting frustrated with your social media results? Do you wish you had more followers, faster growth, and better engagement with your posts? You’re not alone. Many engage in social media hoping to grow their business, but after the initial glow wears off, they begin to wonder why their efforts aren’t yielding more success. But how do you know what to expect from your social media initiatives, and how do you measure results?
The Current State of Social Media:
Social channels are maturing, and they are under tremendous pressure to show a profit. Their challenge is to balance the need to retain and grow a user base while offering advertising and partnership opportunities to the businesses that pay their bills. This means they must continually adjust their offering and algorithms so they can deliver.
What was once proclaimed to be “free marketing” (aside from the copious amount of time required) has developed into a highly competitive arena. The only way you can be sure your message is heard is if you pay to promote it.
There is still an opportunity for organic (unpaid) results, but success varies from one channel to the next. The key is to attract an audience that’s truly interested in what you have to say, and then get them to engage by sharing relevant and meaningful information. An active audience sends a signal to the social platform that the information you provide is something they want.
So How Do I Set Reasonable Expectations for Social Media Results?
Understanding the state of social media is important for setting reasonable expectations. The definition of success for your organization will depend on the platforms you use, your industry, and the nature of your customers. Your organization’s overall goals and what you have done on social media thus far will also have an effect. But, regardless of your situation, the first thing you must make clear is that social media is not a quick fix. Achieving social media results is a process, and it requires resources.
Social media is all about building and nurturing relationships. This takes time, and you must be respectful of social norms. Yes, you can nudge things along and attract new friends by waving around a little money (advertisements). But building lasting relationships that result in ROI requires that you follow through on your promises and deliver value. Once you have made this abundantly clear, follow this process:
1. Create Relevant and Measurable Social Media Goals
If you’re just getting started on social media, your initial goals might simply be to build relationships and establish a reputation. But if you’ve been using social media for a while, perhaps you’re ready to build targeted campaigns. Whatever your status, determine which overall business and marketing goals you intend to support with social media. Then create relevant and measurable goals for each platform you intend to use.
For example, let’s assume your organization sells B2B. You’ve been focusing on Twitter and LinkedIn with your social media. You have built a quality following and have been demonstrating your knowledge by providing useful information to your followers.
At this point, you might decide to invest in the creation of an e-book for the purposes of lead generation. You can use your social presence to support this effort. Current and potential clients can download your e-book if they submit their contact information through a landing page on your website.
Your goal? Use your presence on Twitter and LinkedIn to promote the e-book and drive traffic to your landing page.
2. Specify the Tactics You Will Use to Achieve Your Goals
After you identify what you wish to achieve with your social media activity, define the specific tactics you will use based on the norms of the social channels you frequent. Thinking through these tactics will help you to be realistic about the time required to achieve them and will help clarify the metrics that demonstrate progress.
To expand on the example above, your tactics for Twitter might include:
- Create and schedule a series of tweets (that include a link to the landing page and a specific hashtag) with varying messages and images.
- Track the response to these tweets to determine what resonates with your audience.
- Pin your best-performing tweet to the top of your LinkedIn page so that it is immediately visible to new followers.
Your tactics on LinkedIn could include:
- Create posts (with a link to the landing page) with a variety of unique messages that you can share on your company page over a period of time.
- Ask employees who are active on LinkedIn to re-share these posts through their individual profiles to expand your reach further.
There are certainly other tactics you could use (including advertising), but for the sake of brevity, let’s stop here. My point is that your tactics will be specific to the platforms you plan to use. There will be similarities but each social channel will require unique posts and will offer different ways to reach your target audience.
3. Determine Metrics to Track and How to Track Them
All social media channels offer reports on your performance within that platform, but they don’t provide information on what happens after people leave the platform. Now that you know exactly what you’re planning to do, identify the metrics that will demonstrate your progress and make sure you have the ability to track those metrics.
For instance: The campaign above will attract people to your website to download an e-book. Your social platform will provide metrics up to the point when someone clicks on the landing page URL. You must determine how you will track everything that happens after they land on your website by setting up connections between your social posts and your website analytic tools. Here’s a great blog post that describes how to make the connection between social media and your website with Google Analytics.
If possible, find benchmarks so you can define what success looks like. A great place to start is by reviewing this report from HubSpot which compares social media results broken down by industry. However, your business and your specific initiatives are unique. So you will often need to look for information on a more granular level by monitoring the success of your competitors and by tracking your own progress over time.
4. Analyze Your Social Media Results and Adjust
Once you have everything in place, it’s time to set the ball in motion. Schedule your posts, track their success, analyze the results, and use those results to determine your next move. With a little experimentation and time, you will begin to see what is and is not working. And you will build up historical data that will show your progress so you can set new goals based on concrete information.
Please keep in mind that in the example above every single element involved in the campaign will affect your social media results. If you’re successful in getting people to your landing page, but the landing page is poorly designed, the whole campaign falls apart. So carefully consider every step your target audience will take and tighten up any points of weakness.
Wrapping Up:
With a little planning and communication, you will be on the path toward setting reasonable expectations for your social media results. Stay abreast of the state of social media. Create measurable goals and tactics, then follow through by analyzing your progress and making adjustments. Finally, compare your results to how much it costs for your organization to participate in social media. Then you will be able to show the complete picture and make more accurate suggestions for continual improvement and that ever-elusive ROI.
