Insurance Marketing: Four Steps to Measure Your Social Media Success

Now that your company’s social media outlets have been established and content is updated regularly, it is time to start measuring your social media success. Similar to other avenues of marketing, measuring engagement on social media tools allows your business to see how customers are reacting to your company branding. To track social media engagement, follow these simple steps: start small, tailor the marketing, expand reach and analyze further.

1.  Start small.

Initiate a tracking plan by measuring:

• LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook followers
• Likes and comments on LinkedIn and Facebook updates
• Twitter retweets and mentions

Create an excel spreadsheet to measure the amounts monthly, or even weekly. This is a quick and easy technique to see how the numbers are increasing, decreasing or staying constant. These numbers do not necessarily reflect if business is growing due to social media efforts, but they will help you notice the types of content that receive more attention.

2.  Tailor your marketing.

Craft a few different marketing campaigns to specifically measure the types of content that receive more interactions (i.e. likes, shares, comments, etc.). For example:

• Do industry-related articles receive more attention? Or content that is company-specific?
• Do followers respond and answer posts that ask questions?
• When do followers share posts?
• If the post includes an image or visual, does it draw more attention from followers?
• How does the use of #hashtags influence response?

3.  Expand reach.

Continue posting updates that tend to receive more follower action and encourage followers to retweet or share to build the company’s social media base. Keep tracking the numbers to ensure followers and engagement are increasing. If the numbers decrease, it will be time to revisit the type of content that is being published to determine where followers are lost.

4.  Analyze further.

Use a third party tool such as HubSpot or Google Analytics to gain more insight.  Strive to measure sales and conversions from social media sources, and to determine which social media sources drive the most sales.

Knowing how social media users interact with your business on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook provides a better understanding of how to market to your audience. Building a social media presence expands a company’s reach but it is analyzing and measuring these results that will bring in more leads by tailoring the marketing.