Why are you here? It’s a simple question, yet so important when asked about and applied to your presence on social media.

 

It’s a question that must be asked at the very beginning of the process of embarking on a new social media platform, or social media in general, to help you set the goals that you want to achieve.

 

If your answer to why is, ‘because everyone else is doing it?’ or ‘because it looks like fun’, then please stop and reassess.

 

What will be your reward for effort?

 

Some of the common ‘why’ reasons for journeying into the wide world of social media include opportunities to:

 

–       Build brand awareness: personal and business

–       Showcase expertise / build authority

–       Community growth

–       Engage in two-way conversations with your audience

–       Build awareness of your industry

–       Customer service / public relations

 

Understanding why you are on a specific platform (or social media in general) helps you understand what you are striving to achieve. If you don’t have a ‘why’ or goal on social media, how do you know if what you are doing is working?

 

When you know what you want to achieve you can set about sharing valuable content with your audience that will help you towards that goal.

 

Whatever your goal is, you can achieve it by driving your audience to take action towards it online, with content that engages them.

 

The goal (or action that you want your audience to take) will vary from individual to individual and from business to business, but some of the common goals shared include getting people to:

 

–       Visit your website

–       Read your blog

–       Subscribe to your newsletter

–       Attend your seminar, workshop or event

–       Like or Follow your social media accounts

 

The content you are sharing on social media (your updates and posts) become valuable when they help achieve your intended goal or action from your audience.

 

If your social media content is valuable to your audience, they will find it engaging, which is beneficial to them, and you – as it will draw them into taking action.

 

Simply having people ‘see’ your posts and updates is often an achievement in itself, but if your social media goals reach beyond ‘awareness’, then the end goal should be action, or interaction, not eyeballs.

 

Measuring success on social media

 

Did people click on the link that you shared? Did they watch your Facebook video? Or respond to the question you asked on Twitter?

 

These are important questions that you must ask of the content you have shared as you need to be evaluating and measuring to know that what you are putting valuable time and effort into is helping you achieve your goal.

 

In simple terms, you should be doing more of what is resonating with your audience (or what worked) and adjusting or doing less of what did not resonate (or work).

 

What does success look like?

 

Success is measured differently depending on your desired goal with a specific platform or piece of content, some common interactions or action taking steps, and indicators of valuable content, include:

 

–       Likes

–       Comments

–       Shares

–       Views

–       Favourites

–       Subscribers

–       Click-Thrus

–       Mentions

–       Re-Tweets

 

Social media platform have analytics and insight functions set up for business (and some personal) accounts, that can be used to measure effectiveness of social media content, helping you determine if your audience found a post or update valuable and engaging, and therefore moved your audience to take an action towards your goals.

 

Unlike traditional offline marketing, social media gives you the opportunity to quickly test, understand, and measure the impact, audience and reach of content.

 

It’s important to ‘get the real story’ of your social media efforts by looking into the effectiveness of the actions taken on your content towards achieve your goal.

 

Doing this will help you accurately measure and evaluate success and failure. The opportunities to measure and understand your achievements on the most popular social media platforms include:

 

–       Facebook business page insights

–       Twitter analytics analytics.twitter.com

–       LinkedIn Analytics

–       Instagram Analytics www.iconosquare.com

–       Youtube Analytics

 

So, it all starts with why.

 

Once you know why, you can set a goal that you want to achieve, start creating and sharing valuable and engaging content, that will encourage your audience to take the action that will lead to the achievement of the goal you have been striving for.