Looking for the ways to improve social media marketing?
Which social media channel works well for your business?
Social media marketing is effective when you have a strategy. To make it better track your social media results and focus on marketing, which works well for your business.
To see your social media growth, do a monthly review of your progress.
Let’s create a table in Excel.
Step 1
In a first row type a title “Social Media Growth”.
Step 2
In a second row type the name of each column.
Column 1: Social Media Channels
Column 2: Current month (April + if you want, a date when you start it)
Column 3: Next month (May)
Column 4: Growth
Column 5: Traffic
Column 6: Notes
For the next columns, you repeat fields from 3 to 6.
Column 7: Next month (June)
Column 8: Growth
Column 9: Site traffic
Column 10: Notes
Step 3
In Column 1 (Social Media Channels) list all social media channels you use now.
Step 4
In Column 2 (Month) type amount of followers, you have today in each channel.
Step 5
Choose the date when you will check all statistics again, for example, the first day of the months. At this day fill Column 3 (Next month) with the new numbers of your followers on each network.
Step 6
In Column 4 (Growth) is the difference between two months current and previous. For your first month there maybe just a little difference as you started the table in the middle of the month.
Step 7
If you have a website, it’s good to know from which social media networks people come to your site. We will collect this data in Column 5 (Traffic).
For monitoring that, you need to have a Google Analytics code on your pages. If you don’t have it, here is the guide for the sites, which use WordPress:
How to Install Google Analytics in WordPress for Beginners
If you already have Google Analytics, open it and at the left menu go to the Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels.
At the right corner choose an interval for analytics.
Scroll the page down and below click ‘Social’.
Now you can see from which social media networks people came to your site, which is more useful for you.
Add this data to your Excel file too.
Step 8
In Column 6 (Notes) write what you’ve done during the month to increase the number of your followings.
It’s time to improve your social media marketing. Write down what you think was useful for your marketing and what wasn’t. Keep in mind what are you goals for each social media channel.
Here are a few examples:
Who followed you?
Let’s say you are a photographer, who is sharing your work on Instagram and wish to get more clients. If most people following you are photographers too, probably it’s time to think where you can get in front of another audience. They are not your potential clients.
If you are working on your Instagram account check out these guides:
How to get 10,000 Instagram followers in 2 weeks
How to Manage Instagram for Business and Get More Followers
What posts got more shares? What is special about it?
Looking through the Twitter analytics, you see that the top tweet is How to build a powerful personal brand online
The reason is that it was pinned at the top of the profile pages.
When someone follows you on Twitter, they are more willing to like or retweet your first post.
The top media tweet was the inspirational quote with the image.
Inspirational and motivational quotes, in general, get a good respond from people. They are worth adding to your regular social media marketing strategy.
Who engaged more with your content? Why did the post get more engagements?
When you share the post of other authors and mention them, they get a notification about it and may reshare it or engage with your account in another way.
Save those people in the particular list. They are your support. Engage with them and them’s content too.
Making notes about your social media marketing growth progress helps to track with what works (and worth to do more) and doesn’t work.
Once you’ve created this small report, it will take you less than half an hour every month to summarize the result for the month. Use it to improve social media marketing strategy.
Click here to download ready to use excel file.
If you have any questions or results to share, I’d be happy to hear them in a comment below.
Marina Barayevais an international speaker and coach who helps entrepreneurs craft compelling stories and deliver impactful talks to become recognized experts. She is also a TEDx speaker, has presented to audiences in Asia and North America, and has been featured in such media as ArtPeople, CCTV, China Radio International, and others.