Questions for Your Consultant: Working Efforts
Today I answer the final question in the Open Forum miniseries about questions you should ask your social media consultant. Today’s question asks how do I know if my social media efforts are working?
Out of all the questions in this question series, this is probably my favorite because of my analytical mindset. For the business owner or social media manager, this is also probably the most important question as well because you learn how well you are engaging on social media. Luckily there are a dearth of tools that allow you to understand how engaging you are, your monthly active users, amount of influence and when your followers are usually online.
I usually begin by telling the client that fan count does not really matter, to a degree. Everyone would like to have 5,000 followers but the real truth is that if only 1% of those followers are engaging, then does it really translate to success as opposed to if you had 50 followers with 1% engagement? If your monthly active users are relatively high with a lower count of fans, this means that your marketing campaign is real, working and that you are invoking good feelings out of people.
But I digress (somewhat).
I believe you know your social media efforts will be working when you see an upward and positive fluctuation of engagement on your social media platforms (read: Re-Tweets, replies, mentions to groups) as well as possible increase of sales in your own business. If you really care to measure your social media efforts through numbers, you will notice discover that your Klout score has risen and that your network has really expanded and that you are seen as a specialist within your industry.
Like the open forum post says though, and that I believe hits it home:
If your expert focuses your metrics for success on volume (ie – getting 1000 Twitter followers), they probably have no idea what real business impact looks like.
What do you think? How do you measure real social media impact? How do you know if efforts are working? Tweet at me or comment below.
