Is your company social, or are you a little bit shy? When you're doing business online, you likely put a lot of effort into your social media. Is that effort making a difference for your customer engagement? Here's how to tell if your social media strategies are working.
Your Site Gets Visits
One of the most basic metrics of the internet age is the number of visits to your site. Site visits may be due to online advertising. You can track where your visitors come, and this will tell you if they're coming down the funnel due to ads or guest posts. Site visits can also tell you about the quality of your SEO. Are you hitting the right keywords that naturally drive your potential customers to find your business in the search engines and click on it? This can also be due to social sharing. A post that goes viral can bring in a lot of visits to your site. If your site doesn't get many visits or visits suddenly drop, that's an indication that something on your site or in your site promotion needs to change.
Your Visits Turn Into Questions or Customers
While it's lovely to have visitors, you want your visitors to connect, engage, and finally buy. Monitor the traffic that comes to your site and see what happens next. How long do visitors stay on a page or your site? Where do they go next? Look at the most effective ways to move your customer from interaction with the site into action. If your leads visit briefly and then leave without buying, look at your site and its marketing funnel, but also look at why your visitors came. Was your social marketing ineffective in creating a true interest from your leads?
You're Being Shared
Do your readers like to spread the love for your business? With social sharing buttons and tracking, you can see how often your post is being shared. You'll see if there are particular venues where your post gets more shares than others, and you'll be able to focus your efforts on sharing within those venues. How can you tell if you're getting enough shares? This can be very site and industry-specific. Track your own metrics over time and set goals for social sharing. Learn from others' techniques and from your own failures and successes. Can you run a contest, encourage customers to send in photos, or do something else to get your social sharing to become more active? 
Social media is a conversation. Participate in yours.
People Are Talking With You
Interactions are the foundation of your inbound marketing. Social media is a social medium, it's not just a venue to push out information to your customers. While your blog posts are one kind of interaction, you'll also find that your blog comments and social media discussions can be a rich source of customer interactions and information gathering. How many interactions should you have on each post? Again, this varies by industry, but seek out the typical metrics for your own industry to see how you compare. Generally, between 3-10 posts a week on social media will get you the level of interaction you desire.
When you're looking for help creating a social media strategy that draws in leads and helps them stay on your site, contact Digital Inbound. We know how to track your data and attract your leads, and we can work with your company to create a successful inbound marketing strategy.
