Which Social Media Metrics Actually Matter?
Social media marketing usually sits at the very top of the sales funnel. For example, a promoted post or video often acts as a prospect’s initial introduction to your brand or product.
Because these social posts have been crafted to attract an audience, but not necessarily to close a sale, marketers can have trouble selecting which social media metrics will help them see if they are actually reaching their marketing goals.
It’s critical to use the metrics that actually have value and not just “vanity” metrics that only make a marketer feel good.
What are Vanity Metrics?
Most marketers and content producers feel some sense of satisfaction when their social media efforts get a lot of attention. A large number of likes, shares, or follows certainly indicates popularity; however, the number of likes and shares a post receives have proven to be unreliable indicators of effectiveness.
These “feel good” metrics are known as “vanity” metrics because they may help your ego, but not necessarily your bottom line.
Without some additional indicators of how well a social advertisement or post actually helps attract targeted customers, these vanity metrics can cause you to believe your posts are providing more value to your strategy than they actually are.
For example, you probably don’t expect your first video about your loan company to get viewers to rush out and refinance their house or get a new car loan through you.
What Are the Right Social Media Metrics?
So what can that video do? It might help encourage increased visits to your website or get people to fill out a lead form or to download your informative eBook.
These sorts of actions are more likely to draw interested people into your sales funnel than simply clicking a “like” button.
In fact, prospects that actually follow the link to your website are not likely to then return to your social post just to press the “like” button.
How to Find the Right Social Marketing Metrics
If you’re having trouble figuring out which metrics to use, look at your sales funnel.
Attracting a large number of fans to your social page might help increase visibility, but unless your audience is actually taking the actions you want them to take, your marketing efforts aren’t really supporting your business goals.
Most businesses will enjoy better returns from hundreds of targeted views rather than from thousands of views from general social media users.
Kittens or KPI’s?
The takeaway: Your videos of the latest kitten sensation may get your posts a lot of attention, but they probably aren’t helping you sell your products or services (unless you sell videos about kittens).
It’s impossible for you to know how effective your efforts are unless you choose the right measures. These metrics can tell you what you’re doing right and what could use improvement.
At DBC Digital, We Measure Our Success by Your Success
At DBC Digital, we want to help you get the word out about the great things that your business does. Then we can help you measure what is working and what needs tweaking. This includes developing a marketing and branding strategy that supports your business goals.
Contact us today because we measure our success by the success of our clients.
In the beginning, the dawn of the social media age was heralded as the start of a new era. There was a lot of hype about the ease of creating branded content for marketers and forging direct connections with their customers.
