Today’s SYS Challenge: Set Your Metrics, Measure What Matters #socialtranslator
- How do you really know if your time on social media is well spent?
- How can you truly tell if your strategy is working for you?
- How do you decide when it’s worth spending your hard-earned cash on a software upgrade, assistant, or other forms of support for your online marketing?
The answer to all of these questions is the same:
Look to your metrics.
Metrics are meaningful data points that measure your progress towards your stated goals.
The beauty of online marketing these days is that you can find data relating to just about anything.
Hello, analysis paralysis 🙂
The trick with metrics is figuring out what you want to measure and why it is meaningful for you.
You do this by asking: What insight or action is it going to lead to?
If the answer is a blank look or a shrug, then don’t bother tracking it. It’s probably just a vanity metric.
By the way, this explains why “naked” numbers, like a count of your followers, mentions, or shares, are meaningless. Because they don’t – on their own – tell you what to do next.
But which metrics matter?
Of course, the hard part is, no-one can really tell you what metrics you should track track with any certainty.
Only you can work out what matters, because only you know what you are aiming for.
If you know where you’re headed, you know what to track – Jay Baer @jaybaer (marketing consultant extraordinaire)
However, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here if I say that, for most translators, our aim is to have the work we do on social media lead to a paying client.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Yay to paying clients 🙂
But bear in mind that there are quite a few steps between your social media account and your checkout process.
This is why it makes sense to think about a couple of other key measurements along your sales funnel. (See how this all fits together?!)
An example
One way to give context to your numbers is to cross-reference your traffic with your conversions to see which activities result in the most potential growth for your business.
So, for example, a post to your Facebook page might have a low number of views (traffic), but a high number of those viewers click through to your website (conversion).
This would make it a lot more valuable than a tweet which might have a high number of views or retweets (traffic), but end up with a low number of people clicking through to your website (conversion).
I’ve picked a website view as a conversion here as for most of us, our websites are a key driver of leads into our sales funnel.
(Kevan Lee explains this example in more detail in his post on goal setting strategies: see #7).
Give it a whirl: choose one or two meaningful metrics, and see how it goes.
Further reading
- Which Stats Matter: The Definitive Guide To Tracking Social Media Metrics, by Kevan Lee at Buffer. An unbeatable resource on this topic for small businesses. Has an extremely useful section on how to set up social referral tracking to your website in Google Analytics.
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A Social Media Challenge!
Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to do one thing each day in October that will have an impact on your social presence in the longer term.
Each weekday in October, I’m going to suggest a task to work on for whatever pocket of time you can carve out that day. You can choose to follow my suggestion, adjust it to suit your circumstances, or come up with an alternative – whatever makes most sense for you. Or just dip in and out as it suits.
Follow along on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the blog. Let me know how you’re getting on by using the hashtag #socialtranslator (so I can find you!). If you find it helpful, please give me a thumbs up, a like or a share – that’s how I’ll know you’re finding it useful, and it’ll help other translators join in too.
