How Engaging Are You?
It is important to tie all your marketing activities back to something directly related to your business’ bottom line. We want to make sure our efforts aren’t wasted. And with so many indicators to track online, it can be a bit overwhelming. I like to stick with a few indicators for each platform that are tied back to my client’s sales process. For instance, if a business gets sales every time it sends out an email campaign, then a good goal for marketing would be to boost email subscribers while maintaining our sales conversion rate on the email campaigns. If we run a contest on Facebook that speaks to our target audience and to enter they need to join our email list, then we can track our the effectiveness of that Facebook campaign right back to sales.
There is one indicator that I measure that doesn’t tie directly back to sales but is a good general indicator of our social media health. I call it the Facebook Engagement Quotient. On Facebook, that is the number of fans a page has, divided by the number of people talking about the page. This will give you a % to track. I have found that the target number is different for each of my clients but each client has settled into an average based on where Facebook sits in their marketing mix. It also may change based on the seasonality of their business.
Here’s a little more on the pieces of this equation:
Number of fans. This is the number of individuals following your business page. It does not include the number of other Pages following your page. (You can see which Pages follow your Facebook Page in this video.)
People Talking About. The number of comments, likes and shares of content in the past 7 days. New page likes do not count.
This Engagement Quotient will give you a general idea of how engaging your content is. It is important to note, if your content is not engaging then it is likely not showing up on your followers’ walls based on Facebook’s Top Stories algorithm
I also use a similar quotient when looking at an associate’s profile on LinkedIn. In this case, I look at the number of recommendations divided by the number of connections. It’s just one thing I look at but if someone has over 500 connections on LinkedIn and only 2 recommendations then the value of their network to me is not very high. If someone has 200 connections and double digit recommendations then I think they are well-connected to their network and also have some integrity and skill in what they do. for more about connecting on LinkedIn read, Connecting with the Stubborn on LinkedIn.
What type of numbers do you track for your social media? Let me know in the comments.