Taking Stock of Your Social Efforts

by Geoff Gillette

Many businesses are good about gauging their success or failure when it comes to things of a monetary nature. Each financial quarter, there’s an overview of revenues and expenditures and whether the yearly budgeting is going according to plan. 

It allows companies that are doing well to maximize profitability and those who are having issues to course-correct while there is still time. 

But how many of you periodically take stock of your outreach, and how do you do that? 

As the current quarter comes to an end, now is a good time for at least a snapshot view of how your business is doing in terms of outreach, whether it be through paid marketing efforts to social media.

How well are you following your action plan for the year? What kind of engagement are your posts getting? And if you’re paying for social media promotion are you getting any sort of return on the money spent?

You don’t have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars, nor do you have to use up hours and hours of staff time to gauge areas that are working or not. Here are a few areas to check out when looking under the hood on your outreach efforts:


Where are we in terms of an editorial calendar?  At the beginning of the year, did you map out major events or announcements that would help drive traffic to your site? If so, where are you on that content plan, now that the quarter has ended? Did you hit your goals regarding how many social media or blog posts were called for and did you hit all the social media channels called for in your calendar?

How are you measuring?  Analytics can help give a solid picture of how well your outreach efforts are going. There are some programs on the market that can give you up-to-the-minute data on communications, but they are very pricy and require a lot of knowledge to operate effectively and know what you are looking for. For those who may not be quite as well versed there are other tools out there. 

• Facebook provides their own analytics tools. Users can track how well a post is doing, what sort of reach it has, measure engagement and can provide a breakdown of organic versus paid reach in a promoted post. 
• Hootsuite can provide analytics for your other social media channels, but at the free level it is very limited. 
  
• For your webpages, Google also provides free analytics tools. Users are instructed in how to embed the necessary code on their pages, and can then run searches on how the page is being viewed. It can be broken down by device, and can provide analysis of click-through and bounce rates. It is a good way to see whether your Web page or blog is serving its purpose and driving traffic to your site. 
  

What is working?  One of the best things you can do in analyzing the trends on your outreach is look at the numbers and figure out what is working. Was there one particular blog post that caught your customers' eyes? Or a promoted post that created high levels of engagement? When you see those sorts of spikes, you need to look at two things. First off, take a look at the content. Was it actually relevant to your company or simply click-bait? Secondly, for those posts that trend well and are relevant, is it something you can replicate, whether based on style of post or simply a topic that can be repurposed in different ways?

Are you budgeting correctly?  In this context budgeting means both time and money. Is your outreach officer spending an appropriate amount of time maintaining your messaging and branding? Are they putting their efforts into the right areas? And on the money side, if you’re seeing good ROI on promoted posts but not other paid marketing efforts, can you shift your budget allotments around to allow your communications department to maximize on the areas of greatest engagement potential?

These are a lot of questions, for certain. But taking the time periodically to look at how your outreach is working and where it is performing best can mean the difference between seeing stagnant growth in your company or seeing it move to the next level.


IMAGE CREDIT: ALAN DEAN