How do you measure social media effectiveness? Followers, likes or comments?
Different businesses use social media for different objectives and success metrics vary accordingly.
Here are some typical social media objectives and their metrics, illustrated with examples from Zomato’s great social media presence.
1. Creating brand awareness
You want people to know what your brand stands for and what your brand personality is about. Make sure you have a strong central brand thought. Zomato’s social media is always about food, but food in many interesting ways.
Relevant Metrics: Reach, followers, content interactions (likes, comments and shares). Remember that not all content interactions are equal. A comment or a share is far more valuable than a like. If someone takes the trouble to answer your poll or question, that is a much higher quality of interaction. Algorithms will also value these interactions similarly and your reach will increase in proportion to the amount of high-quality interactions with your content.
2. Traffic to site and ecommerce
You want to send traffic to your site or push app downloads.
Relevant Metrics: Organic traffic and app downloads. Other factors like usage of coupon codes can indicate quality of leads. Remember to use utm codes for attribution, if you are asking users to click on a link.
3. Customer /community interaction
You want your social media channel to be a forum where customers and prospects can reach your team and vice versa for feedback or research
Relevant Metrics: Number and quality of interactions with customers or community. As we mentioned under the Reach metrics, these must go beyond likes and demonstrate an engaged community that comments, shares, tags or actively participates in some way.
All of the Above
A question we get asked often: “But what if I want to do all of the above?”
We’ve shown you how Zomato does all three, but the bulk of its content is about establishing a strong connection with food and entertaining its community.
It is important to understand that at any given point in your brand’s journey, you need to strike the right balance between different objectives.
- Remember to pick a strong, central theme that aligns with your positioning and not create content that is all over the place. Even if it gets you temporary traction, it will not benefit you in the long term.
- Social media is by its nature, a two-way interactive platform. If you only push your products, you will turn people off.
- If your ultimate aim is ecommerce sales, then spend time initially building a brand that attracts the right audience. No point ending up with a massive number of followers who will never convert.
Read this great interview with former Zomato marketing honcho, Pranav Sapra, on Zomato’s approach to social media
Send in a question and we’ll do our best to have it answered.
You can do this anonymously.
You see accounts with massive follower base bit hardly any engagement. But people are impressed with the follows. Engagement can also be bought. Only true metric of brand is organic traffic. Cannot be bought
This is good but too high-level, folks. Could you do a much deeper dive into each. For example, social media for commerce alone.
Very helpful and useful