How to measure the effectiveness of your social media strategy?
The first thing that you have to do when you want to improve something is to understand what is it that you are trying to improve. To do that you have to have some way of putting that thing which you are trying to improve into a quantity you can measure and get some kind of numbers on. This is applicable not just for your web traffic or social media marketing efforts but with anything (or rather most things) you do in your business.
I am starting with my marketing efforts focusing on two areas to begin with - one is LinkedIn and the other is Facebook. So the places where I have to measure metrics are LinkedIn, Facebook and Zyxware.com. LinkedIn and Facebook gives some visibility into the statistics about the traffic that is relevant to us. On the Zyxware website we have Google Analytics collecting data. Across these three there is a lot of data that is available for me to look at. I am not going to try to make sense of all the different data elements that are available but will be focusing on some of the key elements that does make sense to me to begin with.
In LinkedIn I am going to be monitoring statistics about my user profile and that from the Zyxware company page. In facebook I am going to be monitoring the new likes I am getting against all our company posts and the vistors to each of these pages and the likes I get for each of these pages.
In my LinkedIn user profile the key statistics are going to be the number of visitors who viewed my profile over the past week as well as the past 90 days. The other relevant statistics are the number of times I appeared in search results during the past week and the percentages against relevant keywords for which I came up in search results. In addition I will also be getting a feel of the number of people from relevant target segments (industry, designation and geography) that visit my profile although I am not going to be monitoring that quantitatively. All of these pieces of information are available from the "Who has viewed my profile" page.
On the LinkedIn company page for Zyxware I will be monitoring the total number of visitors to the company page. This is available from the "View page insights" link from the drop down under the Edit button in the company page.
On facebook I will be monitoring the number of page visits and the number of likes the company pages gets. This is available from the page insights available to page administrators above every facebook page.
On the Zyxware website I will be looking at the number of visitors from Facebook and LinkedIn. This is probably the only thing I will need to start with as the numbers are already very low for this and any lower level statistics would not have enough data points to make any sense.
I will be collecting this data using a spreadsheet and will be sharing the spreadsheet with the public. You will be able to access the spreadsheet from the following URL - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0And_VYV7iwmzdEhiS01sZVVlUU…. I will be trying to publish as much data as I can without compromising on any confidentiality aspects.
As I learn more and move forward I will be adding more metrics to the above set and possibly start using other automated systems to collate and process the information. I am only setting the basic framework in place and getting the general process going.
