Measuring Your Marketing Efforts

I participated in a webinar today with Social Media Leaps about measuring your social media marketing efforts.  The presenter was Brady Cohen with Point to Point.

Cohen covered free tools all small business owners should be using to measure your online presence in the social media world.  He said you must make it a priority to monitor the stats and then act upon the results.  His definition of social media is content generation.

He provided some sites that can help you understand whether or not your social media marketing is working. 

Let's start with Facebook. 

If you have a business Facebook page, have you taken the time to look at your Insights page?  It contains information on your page views (impressions), number of likes and unlikes.  Pay attention to spikes in these numbers so that you know what your fans like and what they don't.  It also displays the demographic info on who is visiting your site by age and gender.  You can also see where they are geographically from.

And you can see when (not who) someone unscribes (ouch).  This is good to know if something you posted ticked someone off.

It also shows any external referrals to your page. You can monitor these stats on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on how much time you have.  You can view our Facebook page here.

Next is Twitter.

There are so many different tools out there to see how far-reaching your tweets are.  Tweetreach is pretty cool.  You can see the number of users your tweets are reaching, how many impressions you have generated and the level of engagement (RT's Direct Messages, @) and a listing of who is helping to spread your tweets.

Twittergrader gives you a rank based on how influential you are on Twitter. The Chamber's twitter account (Chamberofc) received a 79 out of 100.  My personal twitter (Chambercheri) was an 87.  I can see we have some work to do.

Cohen also listed some sites that you can use to monitor all your social media efforts like HowSociable and  SocialMention.

Bottom line is that if you are trying out social media and aren't keeping track or calculating your ROI, you will never know if it is worth your investment of time and money.