Expert: Proving the Value of Social Media

This month, we’ve discussed building community among your social media followers and encouraging engagement and interactions with your brand’s online presence. We’ve looked at ways to leverage your internal community (your own team members) to boost engagement and trust in your brand.

That’s a lot of great, meaningful work. But…how do you know if it’s making an impact?

Evaluating Impact

I like to look at this at a couple of levels. On the social front, you can track a few key performance indicators. Vanity metrics (likes, impressions, etc.) can give you a high-level view of how your channels are perceived across the platforms. You can get granular about the numbers, sure. It’s important to track these channel metrics and understand why they fluctuate. 

But where engagement is concerned, you want to look at things like comments, shares, and reposts.

One of the biggest ways I’ve been able to tell that our strategy is having an impact is by the increase in what I call humanized engagement moments. These manifest in a few ways, but the most common are in comments and DMs.

Here’s what to look for:

• Comments: 

  • Are you seeing an increase in comments and DMs across your channels?

  • Are you seeing a change in the type of comments and DMs across your channels? In other words, are they more thoughtful and encourage others to respond? 

  • Are your commenters tagging other accounts? And if so, are they tagging them with additional commentary/questions to encourage them to reply meaningfully?

  • Are you noticing a pattern of the same users returning, repeatedly engaging with your account and your individual pieces of content?

• DMs

  • Are your DMs more insightful? 

  • Are your followers asking you questions that require more thorough responses?

What you’re going for here is anything that builds off your brand’s established authenticity. These types of interactions are human, authentic, and personal. Those are key pillars to being a meaningful member of your community. If you see that on the rise, that’s one way to know you’re instilling that in your followers with your content—nice work! 

Going Beyond Social

I look at demonstrating the impact of our work on Social as a holistic story. Telling the full story of the impact of your work is not as simple as measuring one or two social media-specific key performance indicators (KPIs). Depending on your industry, it can transcend what we consider engagement metrics.

Your social media engagement strategy is part of a broader social media strategy, part of a broader marketing and brand strategy that, for most of us, spans teams and departments within our organization. 

Ask yourself: What other touch points are being impacted besides social media? In other words, is engagement manifesting in other ways across your organization?

Here are a few ways this might show up:

• Conversions: Do you see more sales? More sign-ups for your newsletter? More downloads of your white paper?

• Brand sentiment: Is there an overall adjustment in brand sentiment and how your brand is mentioned in the media and in search queries?

• Has your click-through rate (CTR) increased?

Maybe you posted about a sale or promotion recently. Is your sales team seeing a large number of referrals from your posts? Are you seeing an uptick in DMs and private messages asking about the product?

Perhaps you work in higher education, like me, and recently shared a story about a professor’s research. Have you checked in with that faculty member to see if they receive emails, comments, or other messages? Are you noticing that people are beginning to interact more with pages on your website that correlate with the research topic?

 

Final Thoughts

I want to leave you with some best practices for creating an authentic and effective social media engagement strategy. Keeping these in mind has helped me keep my audience’s perspective and best interests at the forefront of my thoughts and strategic direction. I hope they help you as well! 

1. Be authentic. Remember that being true to your brand voice strengthens your audience’s trust, building the best and strongest relationship with them in the long run.

2. Mix it up! Different types of content in sequence or rotation can keep your audience from fatigue. Mix photos with videos, polls with open-ended questions, and links with not.

3. Don’t just post; listen. Remember that the content you’re sending out there is for your audience—not for you. Listen to their feedback and pay attention to what they engage with most.

4. Post at a regular, established interval. This helps keep your audience interested and gives them a reason to check in with your brand regularly.

5. Stay involved. Remember that engagement includes you, too! Respond to comments and continue the conversation with your followers wherever and whenever it makes sense.

It’s been great fun talking with you all this month. As always, I’m curious to know your thoughts, so leave a comment below and let me know what KPIs you report on and how you tell your brand’s social engagement story.

I look forward to staying connected here on mCommunity, on LinkedIn, and wherever else our paths cross!