Welcome to the third part of our tracking protocol series. In this post, we are looking at social media tracking protocols.
We have already covered what data to monitor in your email marketing (Email Tracking Protocols ), on your website (Website Tracking Protocols ), and elsewhere, you also want to track everything you do on social media to ensure that you’re not wasting your time.
There is no point sharing things without a goal in mind and some idea of what you want to happen based on your knowledge of the industry and your audience.
Set Your Goals
When you set your goals, always use SMART goal setting practices so that every goal you set is specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.
This simply means that you need to have enough information in your goal that it is easy to track, plus of course, it should be a goal that is possible to meet; otherwise, there is no point in it.
Some potential goals to set are:
- Reach – Reach 10,000 new viewers within a four-week campaign period.
- Engagement – Receive 1000 likes and 100 comments during the four-week campaign period.
- Following – Get 1000 more followers within the four-week campaign period.
- Traffic – Earn 1000 click-throughs during the four-week campaign period.
- Leads and Prospects – Earn 1000 leads during the four-week campaign period.
- Revenue – Convert 50% of the clicks to paying customers during the four-week campaign period.
Goal setting is one of the most important parts of the process. Take the time to brainstorm the type of goals you want to reach so that you can create a campaign that will succeed. Be specific. Consider thinking about it this way: If you do this task, you expect these results, because of the research you’ve done.
What are Your Priorities?
When you start brainstorming your goals, you may get carried away with how many goals you have defined. It may seem like too much work and be overwhelming and you are probably right.
Take a deep breath and prioritize your goals and ideas based on your overall business goals. Then just put the things you want to accomplish in a logical order that works for you and your business. For example, you may want to work on traffic earning most at first.
Testing Your Ideas
Develop your goal and set up the steps required to reach the goal successfully.
Especially if you are starting out, test only one thing at a time. It may seem like you would save time testing more than one thing but you don’t. If you make more than one change and things get worse, you can’t know which change made the difference and you have to test them individually anyway.
For example, if you want to test your ability to generate traffic using social media to your site, you might want to share content from your website with blurbs and CTAs on different social media platforms. Tweak each headline individually to figure out what works best for your audience. Remember, what works on one platform may not work on another as your audience may be quite different.
Once you have testing as a routine part of your business and have lots of traffic to your site, you can use software to test more than one thing at a time. We will talk more about this in future posts.
Study the Data
Study the data that you’re generating. Use it to figure out if your assumptions worked or not. What actions did you take to create the success or failure you’ve experienced? What else can you learn from the test that generated the data?
Act on The Data![social media tracking data]()
When you get the results of your test, make sure to act on the data. You have wasted your time and effort if you do not take advantage of the work you have done.
If you’ve figured out that the headline you created was very clickable and generated enough views and clicks to accomplish what you wanted, then you’ll want to put this on steroids by turning it into a PPC campaign. If it is not generating enough of what you wanted, then you will need to tweak it and do the test again.
Repeat
Do this process for each goal that you set. Set it up from A to Z and then let it run for at least a week then check the data. If you don’t yet have much traffic, you will have to let it run longer before you can get any meaningful data. Use the data generated to guide your choices and decisions going forward, trying one new thing at a time so that the data doesn’t get corrupted.
As boring as this may all seem, following this protocol to do more testing and tracking of your social media is really a no-brainer. You’ll have to adjust this for your own niche and the goals that you want to set, but this can get you started down the right path. Once you have the processes in place, it can become really interesting to look at what happens when you do certain things.
