Last week, we talked about the critical role that social media should play in your marketing mix; in building customer loyalty, in particular. Making the most of your social platforms is, well, a great start. The fact is, like any marketing medium, social media messaging must be monitored. After all, how else do you know what’s working and what isn’t? Monitoring effectiveness will lead to better-informed, data-driven decisions, which can then lead to optimizing your social media marketing strategy.
1. Start with a social calendar
No, not the one with the indecipherable notes scribbled in Sharpie® that helps you keep track of birthdays; the one that will help you create (and stick to) a posting plan. To make building your calendar a bit easier, Hootsuite will even provide you with a calendar template! And while, like everything in life, it’s nice to prepare weeks in advance for something you know is going to happen, well, we know it just doesn’t work that way. If you can plan your posts a couple of months in advance, you’re doing pretty well.
How often should you post to social media? According to Hootsuite:
- On Instagram, post between 3-7 times per week
- On Facebook, post between 1 and 2 times a day
- On Twitter, post between 1 and 5 Tweets a day
- On LinkedIn, post between 1 and 5 times a dayz
2. Set Clear Objectives and Goals
Now, before diving into measuring social media effectiveness, it is important to establish clear objectives and goals. These objectives should align with your overall marketing and business objectives. For example, your goals could include increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, or improving customer engagement. Defining specific and measurable goals will provide a framework for measuring your social media efforts effectively.
3. Monitor the big three: Engagement, Impressions, and Reach
Reach, impressions, and engagement metrics provide valuable insights into the visibility and impact of your social media content. Frequently used and often confused, impressions and reach are each an important metric to track.
- Reach: tells you how many unique individuals your post reached.
- Impressions: tells you how many individuals saw your post times the number of instances each individual viewed your post.
And then there’s engagement, which tells you how actively involved your audience is with your content. Engaged viewers interact with messaging through likes, comments, clicks, and shares, providing a much more drilled-down view of how your audience is responding to your post. Also, every platform offers some sort of engagement metric. Tools like Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, and Instagram Insights provide detailed information on both reach and engagement.
4. Monitor page likes and follower growth
It’s nice to be liked, isn’t it? Well, you want your posts to enjoy that same feeling. Put simply, the more your content is liked, the better. When it comes to Facebook, for example, “likes” are fairly simple. When someone likes a page, they're showing support for the page and its content. Facebook lets you track page likes easily through their Audience Insights Platform. With Twitter, you can simply click on any Tweet to get a detailed view of the number of retweets, replies, likes, follows, and clicks it receives. Twitter also offers an analytics tool, which you can access simply by logging into your account. Click on “Audiences” and you can view a complete report of your following over the last 28 days. Instagram, on the other hand, does not make social metrics easy. A third-party tool like Squarelovin can help.
Tracking followers
When someone follows a page, it means they are open to receiving updates about that page in their news feed. While quantity alone is not the sole indicator of success, an increasing follower count signifies expanding brand reach and potential influence. Monitor follower growth over time to identify trends and understand the impact of your content and engagement strategies. Additionally, analyze the demographics of your followers to ensure your content resonates with your target audience.
5. Monitor your site referral traffic
Using social to drive traffic to your website? Well, of course, you 'll want to know what platform is driving traffic and what messaging is doing it most effectively. A great way to effectively track website visits from your social campaigns across all channels is to develop custom UTMs which can then be tracked using Google Analytics. UTMs, or Urchin Tracking Modules, are a tracking device that can yield specific valuable information regarding site traffic visit sources. Simply put, UTM tracking involves adding unique codes to the URLs to which your posts link with a click through. If you aren’t familiar with UTM codes or aren’t sure how to set them up, you can find detailed guidance on Google’s Analytics Help page.
6. Utilize Social Listening Tools
Social listening tools allow you to monitor and analyze online conversations related to your brand, industry, or specific keywords. By tracking KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) such as mentions, sentiment, and engagement levels, you can gain valuable insights into the perception of your brand, product, and services on social media. These insights can then lead to a more insight-driven content strategy and help financial institutions identify opportunities to improve engagement, address customer concerns, and ultimately “fine tune” their product and service offerings. Again, HubSpot can be a great resource. Here they list out the “best of the best” social listening tools, making it fairly easy for you to decide which listening tool is right for you.
Ready to get started?
Managing your bank’s social media marketing is not exactly a DIY project and this blog is by no means intended to serve as a comprehensive guide to social marketing analytics. Hopefully, it will get you excited about the possibilities that social media marketing analytics provide and inspires you to give analytics a try. If you decide that this is something you’d rather not take on yourself, don’t despair. There are a number of companies you can engage, such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social, that offer highly sophisticated analytics reporting tools.
About Bank Marketing Center
Here at bankmarketingcenter.com, our goal is to help you with that topical, compelling communication with customers; the messaging — developed by banking industry marketing professionals, well trained in the thinking behind effective marketing communication — that will help you build trust, relationships, and revenue. In short, build your brand.
To view our marketing creative, both print and digital – ranging from product and brand ads to social media and in branch signage – visit bankmarketingcenter.com. You can also contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or via email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com. As always, I welcome your thoughts on the subject.