Why are you on social media? No really, why?
Let’s be real—as business owners, we’re all here in hopes of getting a few extra dollars in our jeans. But the only way that our social profiles are going to translate to bread and butter is if we use them to build genuine relationships and truly connect with our customers.
We’ve all fallen into the trap of comparing the number of likes, followers, and perceived engagement with others. Did you know that these are actually called vanity metrics? They’re the first thing we see on our profiles and they SEEM super important—but let’s take a step back.
Here are the real questions: how many of those likes are turning into sales? Are your many, many (or few, few) followers willing to invest in you and your brand? Quality trumps volume, every day of the week… and twice on Sundays.
If your end goal is a lead or a sale, you must invite your readers into working with you. To do that without being gross about it, you need to build a community that knows, likes, and trusts you. But before you can do that, you must first attract people to your brand and business.
Just like a ladder, we start at the bottom rung (attract) and work our way up (to the sale).
We can break the growth ladder into a few common goals:
- Expand brand awareness
- Build community
- Make sales
It’s very easy to get caught up in vanity metrics, but once we have a solid handle on our primary goal we know exactly which analytics we should be looking at. (Of course, you’re going to be working on all three at the same time—but you should be leaning into one more than the others and cycling through. This is where planning ahead is a game changer.)
Let’s start at the beginning.
When your goal is to attract people to your brand, measure your follower count and post reach.
To increase your reach, create shareable content like quotes, infographics, and useful information. Make sure that you’re also using hashtags and peeping in to see where folks are coming from!
Here’s exactly where you need to look in your grid:
(Your numbers are going to look different depending on the size & general engagement of your audience. For me, this isn’t a great post—but that’s important information too!)
When your goal is to build a loyal and engaged community, measure true engagement.
We’re not talking about the engagement that all of the social media people are telling you to measure. Likes and comments are great, but saves & shares are SUPERLIKES. Direct messages, even better. Businesses are built on relationships, and relationships happen through conversations.
We’ve built a handy dandy scorecard that’ll help you get right down to the nitty gritty. Just pop in your follower count, likes & comments, saves & shares, and DMs and it’ll pop out an overall growth rate and final score for your month!
That covers the grid, but peek into your story insights to see how you’re doing there, too:
Shares, replies, and profile visits are obviously great. But the navigation tells the real story of how interested folks are in your content!
- Back = they’ve flicked back to watch that slide again (high five! They’re super interested!)
- Forward = they’ve tapped to see the next slide in your story (totally okay! They want to see what else you’ve got!)
- Next Story = sad trombone (they’re still hanging out on IG, but have moved on to someone else’s stories)
- Exited = they just realized that they’ve lost 20 minutes in a mindless scroll and leaped up from the couch to get some real work done (also okay!)
My personal goal? Always have more “back” than “next story.” Once you’ve done this for a while, you’ll get a really good idea of which content is most interesting to your viewers!
To increase your overall engagement, call your audience to action… and remember that even little actions count, like double tapping or saving a post. (The more they engage with your content, the higher you’ll rank in their feed.) And remember, you get what you give! Don’t be shy about having full-on convos right in the comments section.
When your goal is to make more sales, measure DMs and leads.
This one is easier than you think!
Simply challenge yourself to have as many conversations as possible. STOP WORRYING about getting more people into the room—focus on the ones that are already there, waiting to hear what you have to say.
Be generous. Be helpful. Expect nothing.
The goal on social media is always going to be to connect with your readers, establish your expertise, and build relationships. It is such a feel-good place to start from, and it’s going to propel you into actually getting real, tangible RESULTS from your social media—and that’s something we can all get behind!
Remember to download your social scorecard right here!
Hope you have a happy day! We’ll see you on Instagram. (We actually will. We’re tracking everything… in the least creepy way possible. 😂)
Ready to increase revenue and grow your business with Social Media? Get our Social Media Marketing Ultimate Guide.
