If you are a Social Media Manager like me, you want your clients to be happy with the job you are doing for them. Too often, clients can “question” what you do: “Is it really making an effect? Where is the ROI?”

This recently came up for me when a client was sent a weekly Facebook Insights email, you know the one you get that has “Weekly Performance” with the mysterious “red” and “green” arrows on it to make you feel terrible? You know, the typical response is: If I am paying for your service, then why am I getting all these “red” arrows? It seems like I am just seeing “red” with all the money I am throwing away for nothing.”

Well, don’t fret. These numbers aren’t just a “balance sheet” on the performance of your social media manager. You are interpreting the kind folks at Facebook the wrong way.

Let me put it this way, if you had all the numbers, like Facebook does, and you were in the business of selling advertising, like Facebook is, wouldn’t it benefit you to present the numbers in a certain way, in order to persuade you to buy more advertising?

Not bitter, or jaded here, but I know some of the Business Owners I talk to are. They look at these reports and then finally decide that hiring a Social Media Management service is just not right for them.

Screen shot 2015-11-04 at 1.12.07 PM

Take a look at these numbers. Call your social media guy, and tell him he sucks!

HOLD ON! You are not seeing the whole picture, and here is my take on it. These numbers above look pretty nasty, huh? All that “red” color seems pretty bad? Let me just say that the above report is NOT an “end-all-be-all” type of “balance sheet” for judgement on your Social Media Management expense.

The Facebook report above does NOT show your entire picture. However, it DOES give you a GUIDE to how to behave, or perform, with your Social Media moving forward.

Here’s what you can read from this report:

Page Likes prove the increase in Brand Awareness. You would want a “green” in that. Its a huge number, look at the number, not the percentage. To increase the Engagement & Reach, we’ll just post 3-5 times a day instead of the scheduled 2.  (but this means you need more CONTENT which we are limited in with just posting out and broadcasting news articles .. You need a writer.) The page visits are down because you need to talk to your AUDIENCE more, and you aren’t doing much of that.
 
So, the above Facebook report is NOT a “State of the Union” report. it is a guide to tell you what to focus on.

I ran the HootSuite reports in 5 minutes, and here’s what’s really going on

If you are not familiar with Hootsuite, get familiar. It’s one of many social media management platforms, (I also use Buffer) and the reports are more detailed, in depth, and do NOT try and sell you on purchasing advertising.
So, let’s run the Hootsuite report:
SWEET! look at all those "green" colors!

SWEET! look at all those “green” colors!

And while we’re at it, let’s run the Google analytics report:

Screen shot 2015-11-04 at 12.38.35 PM

 

And now lets run an Email Opt-in report for the e-book on the website:

Screen shot 2015-11-04 at 12.36.23 PM

*Note: there was a big spike because there was some BIG NEWS in the client’s industry, and I pushed it out all over the place on social media… in other words, I posted a bunch more, engaged more, and people liked, commented and shared more.

AND the people went to the website, and signed in their email address to get the free e-book that was offered on the site.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

That social media DOES work because it drives traffic to your website. Organic traffic with no paid ads… and this is the reason I alway say:

BUILD TRUST – NOT TRAFFIC 

and your traffic will come.

There are 2 major objectives with social media

  1. Brand Awareness – When people like your Page, your posts may show up in their News Feed. Promoting your social media tweets and posts may help you reach new customers while staying in touch with existing ones. When you post, your message will be optimized to reach new people within your audience who are likely to become paying customers. If you want to reach people in your community, build local awareness and even potentially increase in-store sales, you can be promoting your local business to the local area and become an “authority” in your area.
  2. Traffic to Website –  When you drive traffic to your website,  you can target your audience. When choosing your audience, you can add the location, age, gender and interests of the people you’d like to reach. The idea here is to increase hits on your site, and if your site is up to snuff, (it has email opt in and/or products for sale) you may actually generate revenue.

Look at the whole picture and try not to “see red”

So when you look at your occasional email from Facebook, and you begin to “see red” over what is happening, remember that the main objective with those emails is to tweak the presentation of those numbers in such a way as to persuade you to buy advertising.

Instead, use those numbers as a GUIDE to show you what to do next>> reply to comments, like other pages, share other page’s content, and put out your OWN original content. Then take a look at your web analytics to put things in perspective while measuring the performance of your Digital Marketing Strategy. Social Media does work. You can check out my article on Social Media ROI and what is my return on investment here.

If you want more from your social media, give me a call. There may be some more things to look at, so that you can see what’s really going on.

 

Published On: November 4th, 2015 / Categories: Business Development, Digital Advertising, Social Media, Web Development /

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