While social media is necessary for a comprehensive marketing plan for any organization, it might be difficult to truly understand how your marketing efforts, both organic and paid, are really impacting your events, programs and camps.
Vanity metrics like page followers show that your content is being seen, but is it actually making an impact on revenue? A follower or fan, while essential, is not a metric that measures the success of your social media marketing, but it does justify your acquisition efforts.
So, how does an organization measure the impact of social media? The answer isn’t simple, but it can definitely help you be more strategic when it comes to social media marketing.
Social Media Is More Than Just Marketing
There are metrics to every aspect of social media, and data is crucial to every piece. Below are some examples of what social media offers to your organization, how you can utilize them and what data points you need to understand the impact of each.
Community Building - Build community through posts on your organization’s social channels, or create a private or public Facebook group and/or event pages for each event your organization hosts where people can engage with you or each other and indicate whether they are attending or not. Data points: likes, comments and clicks on registration links.
Customer Service - Resolve customer service issues publicly any time a member/customer/participant posts on your page about an issue they are having. If you need to chat with them via messenger, indicate that you’re taking the conversation to messenger via your response to their issue on their post. Data points: engagement, response times.
Brand Awareness - Spread brand awareness via posts and/or pages you create for events. Data points: engagement via mentions, shares, likes and comments.
Participant Experience - Before your programs, classes and camps, participants encourage participants to share past experiences with your organization. Also encourage feedback during via hashtags, and after as well. Data points: Posts to your organization’s Facebook page, tags in photos or posts on all social channels.
Event Marketing - Create event pages on Facebook or event posts on Instagram. Through Facebook, participants can register if you add a link, as well as indicate if they will be attending or not. On Instagram, post about the event in your stories (regularly) or on the regular feed. Within stories you can link to the registration page and in Instagram post you can encourage your audience to tap the link in your organization’s profile to register. Data points: registrations, shares, comments, likes.
Social Opportunities
There are a variety of opportunities via social media in which organizations can impact participation and revenue. Guiding prospects down the sales funnel via social media is pertinent to any marketing strategy. You must guide prospects to first discover your camp, class, event or organization, leverage word of mouth from others who have had a pleasant experience with your offerings and increase engagement.
Build Awareness (Discovery) - Opportunity to connect authentically through relevant posts and communication.
Leverage Word of Mouth (Purchase) - The traditional marketing funnel begins with awareness and flows into interest, evaluation and purchase. Once a purchase has been made, the purchaser becomes a participant and shares their recommendation of your organization, which then starts prospects down the marketing funnel beginning with the awareness created through word of mouth.
Increase Engagement (Participation) - Extending engagement before, during and after an event.
Engagement is not a metric. However, it is still incredibly important to the marketing funnel as engagement (likes, follows, comments) and gets your posts on social media noticed by more than just those who are following your organization’s page.
Extend the lifecycle of your event by creating engagement before, during and after it.
Social Metrics to Watch Out For
- Registrations
- Website visits
- Content downloads
- Posts - engagement (shares, likes, comments)
- Video views
- Time on website
Pro tip: Capture even more engagement through the use of hashtags.
Goals and Metrics
To meet the marketing goals you set for your organization, you should determine what metrics it‘ll take to get to those goals.
Three Essential Data Points
The biggest metrics to track when it comes to measuring social impact include impressions, clicks and conversions—all of which you can easily view in Facebook’s Business Manager (for both Facebook and Instagram), within LinkedIn’s analytics tab for business pages. Each social platform will have its own portal for businesses, and each show a myriad of metrics you can measure. However, the below are the most important when it comes to measuring the impact of your social media strategy.
- Impressions - The amount times your organization’s posts have been seen.
- Clicks - The number of visits your organization is getting from each post.
- Conversions - The number of people who have ordered or signed up.
ACTIVE Can Help Make Your Social Media Campaigns Successful
ACTIVE’s digital marketing services can get your organization’s social ads running and optimized quickly and effectively, making your life easier in the process. Our digital marketing services team can assist you with the creation, implementation and optimization of a digital marketing strategy that’s sure to see a return on investment. Connect with us today to see how ACTIVE can help take your organization’s digital marketing to the next level.
.png)
