A hack but no axe required! It is an oft-misattributed quote to the engineer and statistician W. Edwards Denning “if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it”. With apologies to Denning, I think this is a very useful piece of advice when it comes to tracking social media engagement.
Photo Source: User Alper Çuğun on Flickr Under Creative Commons Licence.
Firstly some assumptions, it is assumed you have a website you want to drive traffic to (say to bring people into your sales process/funnel), secondly that you have some social media accounts you are using to promote this site. With advertising/marketing, you want to know which of your promotions is the most efficient use of your time and resources. Ultimately, this should be measured by how many of the interactions with your promotion result in actual sales but for now, let’s assume this is which of you promotions result in the most click-throughs to your site.
If you are going to put some content out in your social media feeds (Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn) then first ensure that the content has a URL link back to your site. No link and you’ll not gain the value for your hard graft in writing the content for the promotion. Second, have a separate URL (landing page) on your site for each of the different promotions e.g. if you have a tweet in Twitter, include a specific URL back not http://www.mysite.com but http://www.mysite.com/tw/ – then add the content you need for people coming from that source of traffic into the landing page http://www.mysite.com/tw/. To measure the number of users coming from that particular source of promotion, just count the number of visits to that page. To count the number visits to a specific page, we used to have to look at web server logs but in the 2000s, we can just use Google Analytics (you embed a small bit of HTML in your page and Google takes care of tracking the visits and displaying them in a nice dashboard).
Once you have this measurement scaffolding in place, you can do lots of cool tests to figure out which of your ads works the best. You can do so-called A-B testing so you could have said the same copy in an ad but with two different pictures, use two different URLs back to your site e.g. http://www.mysite.com/fbA/ and http://www.mysite.com/fbB/ and see which works. Keep experimenting until you find something that works.
A/B Testing of traffic |
Remember, your time and money are limited and valuable resources. So, make sure you use them wisely when it comes to social media marketing campaigns.
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