SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

5 Tactics to Improve and Track Facebook Results

According to the “2011 Social Media Marketing Report” conducted by SocialMediaExaminer.com, 93% of marketers said they use social media to market their businesses. Among various social media platforms used by marketers, Facebook is the most exploited. It’s hailed as an inexpensive way to engage an audience – but how many marketers know the amount of revenue they’ve generated from Facebook? Or how much they’ve actually invested in the network?

There’s only one way to know and that’s by measuring your results and analyzing the data. Check out these 5 tactics that can be used to track your performance, improve your campaigns and justify your investments.

START WITH TANGIBLE GOALS AND METRICS

You can’t accurately measure anything without a clearly defined objective. For instance, two popular goals include: increase website traffic through social media integration and/or improve brand awareness or reputation. Be sure to assign goals suited to Facebook and your audience specifically. Are you aiming to increase awareness with Facebook or are you more likely to build on your established customer relations?

Now apply accurate means of measuring those goals. If you want to increase ecommerce sales, then you should measure the number and volume of sales generated from consumers that found you on Facebook. Keep a timeline in mind; the overall impact of your Facebook efforts might not be immediately noticeable without measuring several pin-pointed goals such as traffic flow and lead generation. 

SET BENCHMARKS TO COMPARE CHANNELS

In order to compare the effectiveness of various marketing channels, you must establish comparable benchmarks for each method. For instance, if you want to compare the ability of Facebook to generate leads against your other techniques, you must calculate the average amount of lead generations of all channels over a set time. 

Don’t forget your investment however. Sure Facebook is free, but the time spent building the page and engaging an audience generates real costs. You want to be able to compare your ROI generated from Facebook to your ROI from other marketing techniques to determine where time and money ought to be spent for the most return.

CONNECT FACEBOOK WITH CUSTOM INCENTIVES FOR TRACKING

Offering visitors a custom landing page, phone number or coupon code on Facebook makes for an easy and effective way to monitor your Facebook marketing. Using dedicated custom incentives will tag potential customers so that you can better monitor the amount of traffic you’re generating from this medium and understand the behavior and/or motivators of visitors. From this you can better determine the most effective offers and which method is most applicable for delivering it.

USE “PAGE TABS” TO TARGET SPECIFIC GOALS

Marketers can create “tabs” on their Facebook pages that can house title specific material on a subsequent page. Tabs can feature content such as videos, forms to collect visitor information, buttons to websites, portfolio matter and so on. By creating tabs that connect with your overall goals on Facebook, you can measure the channel’s performance. For instance, if you aim to increase email subscribers, you can create a tab to provide sign-up opportunity and measure registration rates from the network. Tag the visitor information with the method in which it was attained and you can accurately measure response rates in correlation to particular channels. 

CONNECT WITH KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

It may be difficult to convey how Facebook helped build reputation, awareness or audience sentiment through charts to the leaders in your organization, so report on the improvements to the bottom line; How Facebook played a role in increased revenue, increased leads, or decreased costs. If you have accurately measured your objectives, you’ll have plenty of data to analyze and realize what those roles might be. For example, if you target wall posts by location, you can focus efforts on several cities and monitor the response in those regions. Then compare any lift that you are getting in those regions to the regions you didn’t promote to. The difference can be used as an indicator of the impact that Facebook marketing is having. 

For help or advice on your social media goals, contact us at Allegra Okemos at (517) 333-0713.