When creating a strategy to engage your customers through social media, it is also important to have a plan in place to maintain those customers and integrate that strategy into future campaigns. Tracking and measuring your social media activity will help you to better understand your results, thus improving your social media ROI in the future. There are many free social media tracking platforms are available to do this, and regular use of these tools will help you improve your results long term. In this blog, I want to talk about Twitter specifically and offer some advice on how to best track your progress.
The graphic below is an example of the average Twitter account – and as you can see there is room for improvement in several areas! The point that I am trying to drive home is that without actually taking the time to look you probably do not realize how your social media accounts are performing. If you have read our previous blog on utilizing direct tweets you can see that this account is lacking in the categories of replies, linking, and tweets per day. The important thing to keep in mind is that although analyzing your social media metrics may uncover your current areas that need improvement; they also provide you with a baseline to measure future campaigns.
(The chart above was taken from twitonomy.com)
Measurement Processes and Key Metrics
Specific metrics that directly relate to your social media goals should be measured, monitored, and reported upon. Stats like “total Twitter followers” are important – but they do not provide you with actual insight on your performance.
Try using these metrics to track your progress on Twitter!
- Tweets Per Day
- Reply Rate %
- Timing of Content Release (Days)
- Timing of Content Release (Hours)
- Mentions per tweet
- Links per tweet
Measuring these metrics on a weekly (or monthly) basis will help you improve your social media ROI, and need be a part of your social media strategy! Measuring the above stats will give you an excellent overall picture – but also break down the most successful elements of your current campaign. You should easily be able to learn what time of day your posts receive the most engagement – whether it is an RT, click, or response – as well as which kind of tweets get the most response.
If you decide to take a look at your stats and are frustrated, I urge you to take a deep breath and remember that you have to be patient! Social media is a timely process – not something that magically happens overnight. That being said you may still have some doubts about your current strategy, so once you have reviewed your Twitter account feel free to get in touch with me if you are still unsure how you can improve. I would be more than happy to offer suggestions based on your current metrics that will help you reach your goals. Please leave a comment below, or e-mail me at amanda@likeavosssm.com.
