Small business owner? Focus on these two metrics to measure with social media

Many people, including small business owners, understand the need to measure their marketing initiatives online. Are you making any money from your campaign? Are you generating any leads from all the money you are spending with your advertising online? Are you increasing your awareness online? If you are new to social media marketing, how are you going to measure the effectiveness of your campaign?

If you are only looking at how much traffic you generate from social media, how many new “likes” you are getting to your Facebook business page or the amount of new followers you have on Twitter, you are basically not measuring the effectiveness of your campaign, but chasing vanity metrics. Anyone can buy followers and likes online. Does this make your campaign successful? Not at all. The same goes when you are getting a new retweet or share on one of your messages. You may be increasing your reach, but is it actually useful to you and what you want to achieve? When it comes to the bottom line, are you actually making any money from your campaign? If not, it’s time to pull up your socks and focus on what matters.

If you are a small business owner and you have limited resources and time to measure what you are doing online, I suggest that you focus only on two tools you can use to measure your campaigns — Facebook insights and Google Analytics.

Facebook insights

While your owned media like your website and blog are the two most important channels you should use to promote your brand, the social networking behemoth Facebook is a great channel you should use to engage with your audience. Facebook is bigger than big and I’m pretty sure your target audience is also using it.

With Facebook insights, you can measure and view the number of people in your audience currently engaging with your brand and also what the reach of your posts are. In both instances, the higher the number, the better for your overall campaign.

This all gets calculated through Facebook’s very own algorithm called EdgeRank. This algorithm calculates how often your community views and engages with your updates and it determines whether or not your updates appear on their global news feed. The more you interact and engage with them, regardless of how big your community is, the higher your EdgeRank and visibility on Facebook.
Over the last couple of years Facebook has made tremendous changes to their overall algorithm so that they can also get a piece of the pie. Instead of being a free for all marketing platform, they have made it a bit more difficult in generating organic engagement on your updates, but it’s still possible. Maybe not to the full extent of what you could’ve gained a couple of years ago, but following this organic method can still yield positive results for your campaign.

Google analytics

While Google Analytics is still the overall norm in measuring the results of any digital marketing campaign, many people are not using it to it’s full potential. Whilst there are many other metrics you can measure with Google Analytics, one of the easiest things you can determine if your social media campaign is effective is to measure conversion rates. This is by far one of the most important metrics you can use to check if your digital marketing campaign is actually working.

By setting up realistic goals (I will dig deeper into this with a follow up blog post), you can basically track and measure how many visitors from social media channels are coming to your website and completes an action. It’s great if you are getting lots of traffic to your website, but if they are not converting into sales, leads or being added to your email list, what is the point.

There are literally hundreds of metrics you can use to measure your online marketing campaigns, but money and time plays a big role. If you are a small business owner and you need to measure what is working for you, use Facebook insights and Google Analytics to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns.