Follow the conversation –
Social Media Expert: Steve, I have a social media marketing proposal for your company that will help you establish your brand presence and cut through the competition.
Client: Um, that is great. This is fine but can please explain what you are going to do exactly?
Social Media Expert: [after a few second] um, it is about promoting your brand presence so, I can’t be specific.
Client: Great, I love your vagueness.
Sounds ridiculous? But believe me this is kind of conversation that you are most likely to have with a social media marketing manager if you happen to ask him to explain what he is supposed to do. To be honest, majority of social media marketing personals have no idea about what they are supposed to do apart from using some cliché terms like – “brand promotion” and their likes just to impress the clients. But in order to convince the client, you need to make them aware of some vital metrics which they can monitor, so that they can justify the amount that they are going to spend:
Engagement
Though I accept the fact that engagement is one of the most difficult metrics to measure, there are some ways to measure it. You need to track and try to figure out what is happening when you are publishing content. Are people sharing with their friends? Are they commenting on the posts? Are the posts getting enough tweets and retweets?
Are the images enjoying decent number of “Pins” and “Repins”. The purpose of running a social media marketing campaign is to make people interact with your brand.
You need to make your clients aware of this engagement metrics so that you can justify the spent. However, if you are struggling to get people engaged in the conversation, you need to monitor what your competitors are doing. Have they managed to achieve a certain level of engagement? Try to gain some insight by following what they are doing and then add your creative inputs and then finally come up with some awesome ideas and hopefully you will be able to curry favor with the targeted audience.
Reach
Just getting people engaged in the conversation is not enough, you need to make sure that number of people seeing your content is increasing everyday otherwise you will find it really hard to explain your clients why he should be investing in the social media project. You need to show him that the audience participation is growing at neck break speed.
But the reach metric is not along sufficient. You need to use both Likes and reach metric if you are trying to calculate engagement in facebook. And this is fairly simple. All you have to do is to try this formula: Engagement rate: number of likes/ total number of reach.
So, what my point is that you can use this metric to almost any social media to be able to draw a conclusion as to whether your marketing efforts are doing any good the client’s website or not.
Referral Traffic
You are promoting the brand, giving your website the brand exposure it needs; that is all good but at the same time, you need to make sure that the website you are promoting is also enjoying some direct benefits in the form of referral traffic from the website.
And the good thing is that you can easily measure how much traffic your social media activities are drawing by login to Google analytics >> traffic source >> Sources >> referrals.
Go down the details a little bit and you will get to know things like top referral traffic, time spent on pages, bounce rate and host of similar metrics. So, with the help of these you will surely be able to create a report to convince the client that he needs to spend more on social media front to see more engagement and more people getting connected to the audience.