No lie, the most popular
post in Instagram history is this picture of an egg. The most popular
video on YouTube is (SINGING) Baby Shark, doo
doo doo doo, doo doo Baby Shark, doo doo doo doo– you
get it, you get the idea. And the most retweeted tweet
in the English language was written by a six-year-old
from Reno, Nevada. Ne-vah-da? Who gathered almost 3.5 million
retweets trying to score some free chicken nuggets
from Wendy's.
So yeah, clearly anything's
possible in these platforms. What's up. It's Jamal from HubSpot. This video will
help you identify what goals you should be
aiming for with social media, and then teach you a
bit about the metrics used to track these goals. If you find this useful,
be sure to like this video and subscribe to the
HubSpot YouTube channel. When it comes to
online marketing, everybody's trying to
break the internet. And it's easy to understand why. Social media has made
it possible to instantly communicate with
millions of people with a tap of a smartphone. But with 6,000
tweets being sent out per second, 4 million Instagram
posts going out every hour, and more than 40 million
minutes of video being uploaded every day to YouTube,
standing out on social media is a huge challenge. Going viral is not an effective
online marketing strategy. But that won't stop
me from trying. A recent survey of how
businesses use social media shows that most
companies focus on things like brand awareness,
brand reputation, community engagement, and market insights. These are commonly called
soft marketing targets, which are important, but
difficult to quantify when allocating resources.
In the middle of
the list, you find things like increased
conversions and nurture leads. These are hard
market goals which are easier to evaluate because
they have direct correlation to your bottom line. So why aren't more businesses
focusing on hard marketing goals on social media? Seriously, why? What's wrong with you guys? I'm going to let you
in on a little secret. Social media platforms
are not optimized for your business goals. They're optimized for their
business goals, which is to keep people on the platform. But you can still hack your
way to serious growth using social media, if you know how.
The first thing
you want to master is knowing what metrics
have actual value and which ones are
vanity metrics. For example, height of my hair
versus how cool this jacket is. One of those is very important. Let me know in the comments. Vanity metrics are
big numbers that look impressive, but have
little to do with achieving concrete business goals. Learning to identify
and avoid vanity metrics will save you from
spending time and resources chasing numbers
that don't actually contribute to your success. To do that, let's start by
breaking down social media metrics into four categories. The first is reach. As the name implies,
reach is how many people are aware of your brand and
messaging on social media. It can be broken down into
how many followers you have, how many people see your
content in their news feed, otherwise known as impressions,
how many people are talking about your brand
on social media, and share of voice, which
means how these numbers compare to your direct competitors. Think of this as how big a
piece of the pie you're getting.
And if you're anything like
me, you want the whole thing. Just one big bite, all at once,
pie everything, right down your gullet. The next set of social media
metrics is called engagement. Engagement means that people are
not just aware of your content on social media, but
are interacting with it. They can do that by
liking your content, commenting on your posts,
sharing your content, and leaving ratings and reviews. These metrics
indicate that people are engaged with
your content enough to respond to it, hopefully
in a positive manner.
Not like the comments I've
been getting recently. And because social media
algorithms love engagement, accumulating lots of
likes, comments, and shares will contribute to more overall
reach, which will in turn increase your engagement. You might have
noticed that we've now covered all of the most
common social media metrics. There are also the numbers
that platforms care about, because they keep people
on their platform, which is how they make money. The question is, are these
numbers helping you make money? For most businesses, the
answer is, unfortunately, no. Yes, you do need followers,
and reach, and engagement to succeed on social media.
But chasing these
numbers alone, kind of like chasing the
ice cream truck when you hear the nice little
ice cream truck jingle, da na na na na na, and you're
pretty sure that he saw you, but he kept going anyway. So now you're chasing
after him, and you're spending the entire
afternoon running from town to town trying to get your
favorite choco-switch swirl. Yeah, doing that
isn't a good idea. And for your business
as well, that won't affect your bottom line.
You need to dig deeper
to gauge success. Which brings us to the next
category of metrics, ROI. ROI stands for
return on investment. What kind of return
are you getting from investing resources
into social media? Is your social media
leading to direct sales? This can be on your own
website, a third-party store, or, increasingly, on an
e-commerce platform powered by the social media
companies themselves. If you're not
getting direct sales, is your social media activity
resulting in lead conversions? Like sign ups and
downloads that you can convert into paying
customers down the road. At the very least,
is social media leading to inbound
links, where people are coming to your website? You might notice that
tracking these metrics require more than
just the data you receive from the
social media platforms. You need to make sure your
own web portals are set up to track the stages
of the sales process after users make the
jump from social media. Only then can you
probably analyze if the revenue you're
bringing in from social media is greater than what you're
spending on social media. Make sense? Of course, you can also
improve your bottom line by saving money.
And social media has proven
very effective in that regard. Especially when it comes to
the fourth and final metric, customer service. How much money can
you actually save? Well, a customer service
interaction on social media costs about $1. That's compared to about
$4 per email interaction, and $6 for every call
to customer service. With savings like
that, it's easy to see why people want to monitor
social media for customer service issues. And you get yourself
a nice stick of gum. $6 gets you a stick
of gum these days. The economy is doing good. To make sure you're
doing it effectively, be sure to track the
following metrics. What issues were resolved
via social media? What was the response time to
initially address the issue? And how long did it take for
the issue to be resolved? Did whoever you helped
send you a nice old meme afterwards as thanks? That's very important. You should keep track of that. With all these
metrics to consider, from reach and engagement,
to ROIs and customer service, you might be asking yourself
how to make the best data driven decisions for your company.
So let's talk
about setting goals that will turn your social media
metrics into actionable items. Start by considering which
of the following metrics that we discussed will
help you best achieve your overall business goal. Now, you might be thinking,
these can all help. But to avoid the
analysis paralysis that comes with too much
data, it's probably wise to start with just one
or two clear objectives.
Once you determine which
strategic objectives you want to achieve, you can solidify
them into clear goals by applying the popular
SMART goals framework. SMART stands for specific,
measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. Specific means knowing exactly
what metric you want to address and how much you
want it to improve. Measurable means being able
to quantify the improvement with exact numbers. Just be sure that the
metric you're tracking is accurately
representing your goal. Achievable means setting
goals that your team can be reasonably expected to meet. Set goals that are ambitious,
but not ridiculous, because that's not
what the R stands for. Relevant goes back to what we
talked about in terms of vanity metrics versus useful ones. Wanting to increase followers,
or the height of your hair, by 20% is a perfectly
fine goal to set, as long as it's directly tied to
something that actually affects your business.
And timely means
setting an exact time period during which you want
to achieve the goal you set. Because of the real-time
nature of social media, it can be tempting to check
your metrics too often. Give your team enough time
to execute their social media strategy without obsessively
following every post's performance. If you want to learn more
about using the SMART goals framework for all your
business goal setting, check out the link
in the description. Now, I'm not saying
you'd be smart, just you'd have to look
at the description. But you would be pretty smart. Please laugh. By pursuing the right
goals on social media, then tracking your efforts
using the right metrics, you'll soon see results that
your business can bank on. And, yeah, hopefully people
send you memes and stuff. Good luck I feel like these are the
things that I notice that no one else notices. Like my hair is a little lumpy. Did anyone notice? Probably not. Do I care? Eh, a little too much.