Are you a business owner looking to use social media to reach parents? Do you actually know if your social media is working and reaching parents? Here are 5 Easy Ways to Evaluate if Your Social Media is Really Working:

I’m amazed at the amount of businesses who tell me that they gained lots of new likes when they ran a competition on Facebook and when I ask them what that social media activity actually delivered to their business, they can’t tell me.

Here are 5 easy ways to evaluate if your social media is really working.

#1. Tie Social Media Objectives to Business Objectives

There’s no point in being on social media unless you tie your activity on there to your business objectives. Set out the main objectives for being on social and then measure on an ongoing basis. Measurement will let you see if your social activity is worth the time and cost of that time and/or any social advertising you are doing.

Define say 2 key metrics for being on social media and every month look up the stats to update your dashboard on how the social activity has worked. So for example, one objective might be “generate leads to our website”. Then every month check and see how many leads were generated from social media.

Tip: create landing pages so that when you attempt to entice people to your website you know that the traffic to that landing page came directly from social media.

#2. Power Up Your Google Analytics

If you don’t have Goals or Google Analytics Ecommerce (link) set up on your Google Analytics then stop reading this right now and go and research this. (read my other post on 5 Quick Tips for Google Analytics which covers a bit about Goals).

These features on your Google Analytics enable you to measure outcomes such as newsletter signups or purchases in an in depth way. This will help you see if your social media marketing is really working.

Tip: When you have your Goal or Ecommerce feature set up try a test to make sure it records it correctly. Complete the goal or test purchase and then check back later to your Google Analytics.

#3. Use Tracking Links

Use a tracking link for all posts out on social media so you know that the traffic came from that source. You can of course look up your Referrers report on Google Analytics but a tracking link gives you even more sophistication when tracking your traffic and it also helps confirm the stats on GA.

Tip: Set up a free account on www.bitly.com and for every link you put on social media use a new bitly link. Super user tip – if you need to use the same URL but want different bitly links, then add a ?code to the end of your URL before you create your new bitly link.

#4. Make Sure To Structure Social Giveaways to Meet Objectives

Too many businesses are tempted to run like and share Facebook giveaways. There are couple of problems I see with these.

First they don’t abide by Facebook’s promotional guidelines. Here’s the current text at time of writing:

Personal Timelines and friend connections must not be used to administer promotions (ex: “share on your Timeline to enter” or “share on your friend’s Timeline to get additional entries”, and “tag your friends in this post to enter” are not permitted).

And secondly they don’t contribute to the business objectives other than increasing FB likes. When I ask business owners or marketing managers what did that giveaway bring to your business, they pause. I ask did you get email addresses from the entry? did it generate sales? Think about how you can structure your giveaway to meet your business objectives.

Tip: Try not to get caught up in the “we need more likes” fervour, those new likes are only worth gaining if they are going to contribute to your Facebook community in some way or contribute to your company’s bottom line at the end of the day.

#5. Use Unique Discount Codes

Set up some unique discount codes that you only use on social media. This will let you see if you really are generating results from social.

This is an ongoing process of testing and tweaking (Hey? Isn’t that Marketing?) so you will need to try things and see if they work.

And don’t use the same code in different places for your marketing as you will never truly know then where people came from.

Tip: use different discounts codes for different channels so you can compare cross channel.

Would you like advice and help on social media for targeting parents? Contact us and we can help.