There are so many articles out there telling you that you can make money with social media, and how – just a quick Google brings up a great number of these. However, knowing that social media is actually the reason for a specific amount of profit being generated is something else entirely.
OK, so let’s start from the beginning. You hear from a friend who has a small business similar to yours that they are ‘making a killing’ on social media. You set up appropriate channels, start to post content on them, run competitions to gain more likes.
Restaurant chain ASK Italian has built a passionate and engaged social community and state that they are in social media for the long term. When the chain ran a campaign promoting its Internal Chef of the Year competition, they found that it generated a great number of leads.
Kitchen appliance company NEFF already had an active community on their Bake it Yourself community page. They decided to see whether this engaged community could become brand advocates, and in turn stimulate sales. They offered fans of the Bake it Yourself Facebook page a £100 voucher off a purchase of a new oven, leading to a positive sentiment increase, stockist footfall increase, and more importantly, a 38% conversion rate increase.
As a small or new business however, how do you know that this activity is actually making you money? And if it isn’t, why should you be doing it in the first place?
Our advice –create a strategy, implment, and measure. Whilst you’re measuring; evaluate what you are doing. “How can you do this?” you might ask. Well, here we go.
We’re assuming that you already have Google Analytics. If not, what are you sitting here for?! Make sure that you have it set up. It’s free software which gives insight into users and how they use and navigate around your site. Did we say it’s free?
So, Google Analytics helps you to find out where visitors to your site are from, whether they engage with the content on your site, and how long it takes before they leave your site. You can set up goals on Google Analytics, which can match your business goals and allow you to measure whether those visiting your site are fulfilling these goals. In addition to setting up goals, you can also use Advanced Segments, which allows you to segment your traffic and see how specific traffic behaves on your site. You can set Advanced Segments which are on a more individual, per channel basis, and also on a more comprehensive basis, so that you can segment paid and non-paid social for example. Once this is up and running and you have goals set up, you can see how much money social traffic is generating for you.
In addition to Google Analytics; Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn all offer analytics for their paid services. On Facebook, you can set campaign targets as ‘Website conversions’, which allow Facebook to optimise the ad for conversions. You can also view conversion data the reporting section of Ad Manager, allowing you to see whether your ads are indeed converting, and how much they spend. Twitter lets you do similar, but make sure that you set up conversion monitoring correctly, complete with adding pixel codes to your website so that this tracking is accurate.
It must be remembered that social often supports other channels, so even if you can’t find precise figures in analytics tools, the social may have driven the sale through multi-channel attribution. Social signals can create and support brand recognition, which in turn leads to sales. Don’t write social off just because you can’t see goal completions leading directly from it.
From there on, it’s up to you what you track and what you change about your social strategy. Make sure that you monitor the activity regularly, and alter as and when you need to. Changes can be made – in fact, being able to make changes to social campaigns shows flexibility. Demographics, trends, and consumer preferences change, as does social memory and the communication channels themselves. Taking advantage of real-time, current-event opportunities (think Oreo’s “Dunk in the Dark” Tweet) can benefit your brand and could even drive your content viral.
Social conversion tracking isn’t rocket science, but needs to be done correctly. Once it has been set up, then you will be able to track how much money you do actually make from social activity, and evaluate what works, what doesn’t, and where to lead your social strategy for the future.
By Natalie Arney, Digital Marketing Specialist at Bozboz.
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