With the increased importance of digital marketing, businesses can no longer afford to overlook the importance of social media. With this new tool, businesses can more easily gauge growth trends. New metrics now include followers, likes, and comments.
Followers
Your number of followers will give you a rough estimate of your online presence. The trends in this number won’t vary much from campaign to campaign. However, this can be a very good indicator of overall progress and especially of big business decisions. Here you want to watch out for plateaus that last too long. In this case, it might be time to change marketing and PR strategies. Did you just hire a new marketing and PR company? You can gauge the success of this new partnership through subsequent growth trends in your number of followers. Fair warning to newcomers to the digital marketing scene: the initial burst of growth you may see can’t last forever!
Likes
Likes are the easiest way to gauge your viewership since most social media platforms don’t have a viewer count. Having millions of followers is great but if only half of them are logging into their Facebook accounts, you’re not getting a lot of exposure. What’s more, likes are a lot more variable than followers. Establish your average number of likes per post and use that as a reference to measure the success of future posts and campaigns in general. You should keep in mind the big picture offered by your follower count. An increase in average likes is usually not an indicator of higher quality post as much as an indicator of more views. One last thing to keep in mind here is that you have to have a base timeframe. A post that got 120 likes in five hours is not necessarily more successful than one that got 110 likes in four hours.
Comments
Businesses that have a well established online presence should start to look to comments. The comments section is an in-depth response to your post and even your campaign as a whole. Similar to likes, comments will give you a metric to measure exposure. Beyond that, comments will allow you to associate personalities to your number of likes. This will make it easier to get your audience insight, an important element of any good marketing campaign. Comments also allow for interaction between clients, offering an outlet for exposure through word of mouth. In some cases, people might even post reviews making for an extra outlet for feedback.
A Quick Note on Shares
The number of shares of a post is indicative of success in the same way that likes are. You won’t get the same depth of information as comments. That said, shares can be interesting to look at since it takes more “effort” to share than to like. In this sense, they can be an extra tool you can keep in your back pocket to steer your digital marketing strategy in the right direction.
A/B Testing With Macias Labs
Follow these guidelines to make the most of your A/B testing. If you’d like to optimize your A/B testing strategy, we’d be glad to discuss helping you do just that.
