Evaluation and reporting
Evaluation and reporting
Once you’ve identified your audience and thought about how best to engage them, you can use analytics to tell you if it’s working (or not). If you know your goals for social media, this bit is very useful.
Engagement
Engagement is an umbrella term for the likes, shares, clicks and comments from your fans and followers. It’s a good way of telling whether people are listening to you, and judging how relevant your content is to them.
It’s important to have an idea of how much engagement you can hope to generate, so start by setting some targets, based on benchmarks:
- With yourself – how much engagement do you achieve, on average?
- With competitors – are similar accounts to yours getting engagement with their followers?
Facebook and Twitter both provide account administrators with free analytics. Explore them to see which of your posts gets the most engagement, then ask yourself why that is.
Reach
How many people saw your post (or at least potentially saw it)? Reach gives you an idea of how many people you are broadcasting to, but it doesn’t tell you whether they read the information, watched the video or clicked on the link.
Your potential reach is likely to be higher if you have generated engagement – your followers are sharing, liking and commenting, and those things reach their own networks. By focusing on trying to achieve engagement, you’re more likely to increase your reach.
Outcomes and ROI
What is the value of a follower? It depends what they do. What are the actions and behaviours that you want to trigger in your followers? Once you have determined what ‘R’ is, and worked out what ‘I’ means, you can prove your social media ROI.
It’s important to identify the outcomes you want to achieve on social media. Why? It gives you a clear focus, and it helps you work out whether you’re achieving your goals or not.
Here’s an example. If you want your followers to go to an event you’ve organised, you can create a webform for them to sign up to the event. You can shorten the URL to track the number of clicks.