Conversion on social networks. The effectiveness of advertising on social networks: indicators and evaluation stages

26.01.2018

If you use the same strategies in social networks over the years, it may be time to review your goals and ensure your social media tactics are increasing conversion rates, increasing brand awareness and attracting new customers.

1. Double the number of videos on your channels (if you aren't already)

Let's face it: Internet users are addicted to video, and that's great for publishers and marketers.

On average, Facebook users consume 100 million hours of video every day. About 82% of Twitter users watch videos on this particular medium. Marketers are also seeing positive results with LinkedIn Video, which was introduced last August.

If you want to increase your social media conversion rate, double down on the channels that are already working for you. For example, if you see more engagement on Twitter than on LinkedIn, it's a good idea to focus your efforts on Twitter.

2. Use smart, conversion-focused social sharing buttons

Today's social media user expects your service to be timely and responsive, even when it comes to customer support. Why not give them what they want? Send personalized and timely responses, even if it's just a simple customer support tip.

Let's be honest: we've all been on social networks for a long time. If your old routine isn't getting you anywhere, it may be time to change tactics that will speed up conversions and even sales. On January 30, we will hold an event at which 4 leading experts will tell you what you need to do to

Social networks can bring you tons of free traffic, do not require initial investment, and scale well. But to achieve the final goal, you need to understand whether you are moving in the right direction at all.

We already wrote in a previous article that when assessing performance indicators in social networks, it is worth paying attention to such indicators as engagement rate, reach and follower growth, customer acquisition and associated direct conversion (Assisted and Direct Conversion). And if everything seems to be clear with the engagement rate, reach and subscriber growth (the data can be viewed on social networks, or in the KUKU.io extension for analyzing social networks), then such important performance indicators as customer acquisition and associated and direct conversions may be unfairly stay away.

Fortunately, Google Analytics, when combined with social media analytics services, gives us information about more than just traffic sources, visitor paths, demographics, and conversions. WITH using Google Analytics can also tell you how social networks affect your final conversion, how much money the popular social networks on your list bring in, which links get the most attention, and how much the content you publish is able to retain and re-engage your audience.

Sounds good. Now I suggest you look at where to find this data in Google Analytics.

If you want to get social media data from Google Analytics, you need to start with Google connections Analytics for your site and Goal settings (as a result, conversion tracking). As goals, you can select registration, subscription, starting a trial period, clicking on the “Download”, “Buy” button or, for example, “Add to cart”. You can learn about setting up goals in Google Analytics here:

If you need to target a button click, you can find information on how to set up the necessary events and virtual pages in this article.

Once the goals are set and you have verified that the data is being collected correctly, we can move on to the next steps. You can find reports on social networks in the Traffic sources tab:

Log in to Google Analytics and go to the Reports tab.

In the left menu, select the “Traffic Sources” tab.

Select Social Features.

Next, you can select the tab that interests you, here you can find: a general overview of traffic, information on conversions, login pages, as well as recent activities on social networks (which will most likely be useless to you, and then I’ll tell you why) , backlinks, user paths and plugins.

Social Network Analysis: Traffic Overview

Here you can see a graph of the importance of social networks. Google Analytics cuts through all the (unnecessary?) information and shows you a fascinating bouquet of sessions and conversions.

Conversions. In the top screenshot, the number 1,199 is the total number of all conversions from absolutely all traffic sources (direct, referral, social networks, etc.) for the selected period.

Associated conversions. They can be displayed automatically in place of the “conversions from social networks” item or calculated as the difference between “conversions from social networks” and “conversions from the last interaction”. Assisted conversions are those conversions that social media helped you achieve. Visitors came from social networks to your site at least once without converting, but their subsequent visits from other sources led to the desired result.

For example, a person saw your post on Facebook and went to the page and left it. After a few days, he remembered your service or product and returned, registering, subscribing, making a purchase, etc. By the way, you can see how many days later in the “Time to conversion” tab.

Of course, there are some “BUTs” here. Let’s say that if a person used one device during the first transition, say, a mobile device, and came back again to complete the conversion from another, then the associated conversion will not be credited to the social network. However, by considering this indicator, you can track the general trend and observe the overall picture.

Direct conversion (Conversion based on last interaction). This is the conversion that users make directly from social networks.

To display this interesting chart, goals must be initially configured. If you want to display not only goals, but also the money that conversions from social networks bring you, assign a value in the goal settings.

Social media statistics: conversions

In this tab you see two graphs: sessions from social networks and all sessions. And now I have good news and bad news. I'll start with the good one. In order to see conversions and the growth trend of conversions from social networks, you do not need to configure anything. Google Analytics calculates all data on transitions from Facebook, Twitter, Vkontakte, Google+, etc. automatically. If you get a good mention on social media or people like your content, share it, like it, and click on it, you will see rises in the graph.

The bad news is that this information may not be accurate. For example, if you use any link shortening services to analyze social networks (say, to attach a UTM tag), the conversion data will go into direct or referral traffic and will be displayed in the “all sessions” graph, not “sessions from social media”. networks."

Add the New Users and Repeat Users segments to get an overview of the mix of new and repeat visits.

As we already wrote when talking about attracting users from social networks, it is impossible not to start with the frequency of transitions to your site. The metric divides visits to your site into two main categories: new and repeat. While repeat clicks reflect the effectiveness of your social media content and audience engagement, new clicks show whether by increasing your “reach” you are actually getting more clicks.

Social Media ActivitySocial Data Hub is a free platform for integrating social media activity feeds, including votes, comments, and +1s, with Google Analytics.

In the Social Media Activity tab, you'll see the latest posts and conversations around your brand. But when I talk about social networks, I don't mean Facebook and Twitter, but also Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn and others. The Social Data Hub, with the help of which this data is loaded, has support for such social networks as Google+, Reddit, Disqus, and also, fortunately for the owners of VKontakte pages and groups, this social network. Full list:

So, when using this information in Google Analytics, remember that this is only a SMALL part of all the social activity around your site.

Social Network Analysis: Login Pages

There are at least two ways to track how many visits your blog article or social media page is earning. The first way is to configure UTM tags automatically through the scheduled posting app or through Google's link builder. If you need to quickly see the number of clicks from social networks to a specific link, go to the “Login Pages” tab.

By clicking on the link, you will see a breakdown of the number of transitions by specific social networks. Let’s say that our article on the KUKU.io blog on how to generate leads on VKontakte received 164 clicks, of which 154 were from Facebook and 10 from VKontakte. We still need to work on promoting content on this social network. :)

Social networks and website conversion

Let's move on to the most interesting and revealing indicator, conversions. When we talk about measuring the effectiveness of online marketing, we often talk about the final conversion to a customer, as well as the return on investment. But the thing is that users of social networks do not always directly convert into your users on the site, and this is the difficulty in analyzing the effectiveness of social networks. On the other hand, you should not neglect the need for a brand presence on social networks.

And while search engines, email newsletters and other channels bring instant results, social networks increase brand awareness and ultimately bring in new users, but through other channels. These are associated (or assisted) conversions.

In the Conversions tab, select Assisted and Last Click Conversions. In the table you will see data for each social network:

Associated conversions. Visitors came from social networks to your site at least once without converting, but their subsequent visits from other sources led to the desired result.

Assisted Conversion Value. Let me remind you that you can set the value of the final goal in the goal settings.

Last click or direct interaction conversions. The number of conversions in which the channel was the last interaction.

The value of last click or direct interaction conversions.

Ratio of associated and direct conversions. By comparing Assisted Conversions to Google Analytics Last Click Conversions, you can determine which social networks are ideal for maintaining relationships with existing customers and which ones are ideal for generating and generating new business.

At first glance, estimating the ratio may not seem obvious, but here's a hint: if the value in the last column is closer to 0, then social media traffic is converting into registrations/sales/subscriptions, but is not causing users to return to your product over time. having the greatest impact on the site’s associated conversion, an indicator close to 1 indicates a balance between associated and direct conversions. The higher it goes from 1, the greater the role social networks play as auxiliary sources.

In the case of KUKU.io (our service for SMM), we try to focus on promoting and developing the brand on social networks, so Facebook and Vkontakte are channels for us to attract new users. At the same time, statistics say that our Twitter profile currently does not bring any results at all and something urgently needs to be done about this.

However, for other projects the picture may be diametrically opposite. For example, data from another site is a clear example of the balance between associated and direct conversions. We can conclude that visitors both move from social networks (in particular, Facebook), to our page, leave, and return again from other sources, and convert by direct click.

If you have multiple conversions set up on your site, you can select those for which you want to view data in the drop-down list above the graph.

Since you've made it this far, you'll probably find it interesting to see the associated conversions not only for traffic from social media, but also for other sources. If so, follow the steps:

Open the Conversions tab.

Select Multi-Channel Sequences.

Select Assisted Conversions.

Google Analytics also shows you not only how much traffic is coming to your site from each social network, but also helps you see the role of social networks in your overall acquisition strategy. To do this, select “Conversions”, then “Multi-Channel Funnels” and “Top Conversion Funnels”. In our case, social networks are involved in 4 of the top 10 conversion paths:

Social network plugins

Google Analytics should help us track clicks on buttons on social media widgets embedded on a website, blog, or app. But if I open the “Plugins” tab, I, like most of you, see this picture:

Is there something missing? Yes data!

The fact is that Google Analytics automatically collects information only from the Google+ button. Unfortunately, in order for data on buttons of other social networks to appear here, it is not enough to copy a few lines from the documentation into the site code. You need to make the appropriate settings for each individual button, much like setting up events and goals.

In order to set up tracking of button interactions, you need to set up the _trackSocial tracking method, which will send data to Google Analytics as soon as the user clicks on the social network button.

Facebook plugin

So, if you want to store data about the likes, unlikes of your pages, and people who have shared your page, you can paste the following code on the page you want to track data from that has the Facebook plugin:

window.fbAsyncInit = function() ( try ( if (FB && FB.Event && FB.Event.subscribe) ( FB.Event.subscribe("edge.create", function(targetUrl) ( console.log("ga track fb like", targetUrl); ga("send", "social", ( "socialNetwork": "facebook", "socialAction": "like", "socialTarget": targetUrl )); )); FB.Event.subscribe( "edge.remove", function(targetUrl) ( console.log("ga track fb unlike", targetUrl); ga("send", "social", ( "socialNetwork": "facebook", "socialAction": "unlike ", "socialTarget": targetUrl )); )); FB.Event.subscribe("message.send", function(targetUrl) ( console.log("ga track fb share", targetUrl); ga("send", "social", ( "socialNetwork": "facebook", "socialAction": "send", "socialTarget": targetUrl ) ) ) catch(e) ( console.log("facebook script installation failed", e);

Video advertising is primarily a media tool that works best at the upper stages of the user acquisition funnel. A creative video attracts attention and helps introduce people to the product or maintain the image component.

But video creatives can also be used to solve performance problems. We'll talk about this today.

Let's take a closer look at In-feed placement; it is this that often gives the best return on investment ratio. And there are a number of reasons for this:

VKontakte

In-feed video advertising on VKontakte is presented in the form of “Universal Recording” and “Site Advertising” formats. If you use these formats, your ad will look like a feed post. Posting in a feed has several advantages:

• nativeness;
• ability to add a lot of text;
• engagement: people notice and respond well to ads in the feed.

If you use the “Universal Post” format, you create a separate post that has all the restrictions of regular posts, and when you click on the ad, the user is added to your VKontakte group. You can also add a video to your post, but it won't play automatically. A link to the site must be added separately inside the post, or you can use a block with a button that will lead to the site.

• title (up to 25 characters);
• description (up to 90 characters);
• image or video (video will automatically play without sound).

Clicking on a post or action button will take the user directly to the site (as opposed to a generic post).

How to Create Conversion Videos

If you want to create a video, you have four main options:

• Contact an advertising agency. The result will be of high quality, but you will have to pay well for it.
• Order a video from a freelancer. It's cheaper, but the results may not be as impressive.
• Make the video yourself. An acceptable option if you are ready to come up with a script yourself, organize filming and edit the video. In a word, it all depends on your capabilities.
• Make a creative slideshow. This is the simplest option of all; you need to prepare the slides and arrange them in a video editor.

• Be sure to add a call to action.
• Include in video detailed description USP.
• Add subtitles so that you can understand the video even without sound, since by default the video plays without it.
• The first five seconds of the video should be as exciting and attention-grabbing as possible. This is necessary to distract a person from watching the feed and switch their attention to the video.
• You should not make a video longer than 15 seconds. Ideally, no more than 6 seconds. The rate of content consumption is constantly growing, modern users are not ready to waste their time on videos that are too long.

Ivan Ivanichev

In February, we published an article “Analysis of indicators for tracking the effectiveness of Internet marketing.” Readers loved the material and demanded more.

You asked, we did: we tried to collect all the most important indicators for analyzing social media marketing. The information will be useful to text message operators, managers and business owners.

Warning to customers: do not go to extremes, evaluating SMM either by one indicator or by all at once. In the first case, a single metric shows a distorted picture and is easily inflated by an unscrupulous performer. The second assessment method requires too much time and effort.

Metrics for assessing subscriber dynamics

Let's start with metrics that reflect the dynamics of subscribers and, therefore, the effectiveness of the SMM strategy as a whole.

• Number of subscribers (Followers)

Perhaps the most famous metric in SMM: it is widely used in reports and is set as a KPI. Of course, you can cheat followers, but such scams are easy to spot.

If you have any suspicions, you need to study the accounts of newcomers - bots and “dogs” are immediately visible. At the same time, it is worth comparing the geography, age and other important data of new subscribers with portraits of the target audience. Characteristics vary greatly - questions to the SMS operator.

Read more about independently searching for bots in social networks and services for identifying fake accounts in the article by Dmitry Dementiy.

Formula: (number of new subscribers / total number of subscribers) * 100%.

The formula can also be improved by substituting net growth into the numerator: the difference between the number of new subscribers and the number of those who left the community. This will make it easier to assess audience interest, the relevance of posts, and the effectiveness of advertising, if it is included.

• Number of Views

For reports, as a rule, a summary indicator is used: the number of views for all community posts for a certain period.

• Reach

Reach shows the number of people who interacted with a community post(s) at least once.

As in the case of the previous indicator, customers are mainly reported on total coverage. It is considered separately if there is an intermediate task: to compare the effectiveness of several posts.

Viral reach directly depends on interest in the content, paid reach depends on the advertising budget. Organic reach is influenced by the number of followers and the frequency of publishing content, but there is also an unstoppable force - social media ranking algorithms.

If KPI's are limited to the dynamics of subscribers and posting, the Peakfeed service is suitable for tracking. It can work with 8 social networks (VK and OK, however, are not included in the list). Cost – from $5 per month.

Livedune will do a better job of tracking most important indicators - subscribers, reach, views and engagement metrics (which will be discussed in the next section). Tariffs start from 195 rubles. “Livedune” knows how to work with all Russian social networks and even LiveJournal.

Metrics for evaluation feedback from the audience

Now about the metrics that reflect various user reactions. Likes, comments, shares or reposts are the simplest, well-known, but not the only indicators for assessing audience feedback.

• Love Rate

Likes in terms of audience size. Formula: Likes / Followers * 100%.

• Talk Rate

Comments in terms of audience size. Formula: Comments / Followers * 100%.

• Amplification Rate

Synonym: growth rate. Formula: Shares / Posts (number of posts) * 100%.

AR characterizes the virality of content. The higher the indicator, the greater the free reach and the cheaper it is to attract subscribers.

Sometimes likes, shares, comments and their coefficients are not calculated separately, but rather a more general indicator is taken - the volume of engagement (Engagement Volume). Formula: Likes + Comments + Shares.

• Audience Engagement Rate (ER)

There are several ER formulas.

One calculation option: take the number of community members who made at least one engagement (like/repost/comment), then divide it by total number subscribers.

There is also this formula: (sum of all engagements / number of subscribers) * 100%.

Advice to specialists from Daria Samoilova, SMM manager at Netology: “If you report on subscriber growth, try to show it in conjunction with ER. Because the best guarantee of the absence of bots and “dead souls” is growing or at least not falling engagement in the account. This is important."

The disadvantage of this indicator is that it is subjective: it does not take into account coverage, engagement on specific days, and interaction with individual posts. Therefore, experienced text message operators use several subtypes of ER.

• Engagement Rate by Reach (ERR)

Formula: (number of engagements / reach) * 100%.

The metric shows the approximate share of those who saw community posts and, one way or another, reacted to them.

• Daily Engagement Rate (ER Day)

Formula: (number of engagements per day / number of subscribers) * 100%.

Daily engagement shows how many times per day the average subscriber is active.

• Engagement Rate of Post (ER Post)

Formula: (sum of engagements per post / number of subscribers on the date of publication) * 100%.

The indicator allows you to assess interest in specific publications and compare posts with each other in terms of effectiveness.

• Engagement Rate by Views (ER View)

Formula: (number of engagements per post / number of views) * 100%.

One must be careful with conclusions based on this indicator, because social networks do not count unique views.

• Average Response Time

The metric reflects the time it takes community administration/brand representatives to respond to audience messages. This is an important indicator of quality of service and respect for customers.

To estimate the average response time over time, you can use the following formula: (response time for the previous period / response time for the reporting period - 1) * 100%.

• Response Rate

The metric shows the percentage of questions that users received an answer to. Formula: (number of answers / number of questions) * 100%.

According to JagaJam data collected across Russia, brands respond slowly and do not answer even half of the questions.

Conclusion: with the help of quality service you can outperform most competitors.

For regular monitoring of responsiveness, the same JagaJam is suitable. It can collect statistics on both your brand community and competitor groups. In addition to response rate, the service can calculate subscriber dynamics, engagement and other important SMM indicators. Tariff plan Personal in JagaJam – 2,700 rubles per month.

There is also a foreign service for improving the quality of customer service on social networks - CX Social. It monitors posts mentioning a brand and notifies you about them in a timely manner. Rates are unknown, but you can request a demo.

Metrics to measure traffic and conversions

The metrics from the previous sections are mainly about the internal SMM kitchen. Businesses are interested in sales. We'll tell you how you can evaluate the efforts of the SMS operator to bring the audience to a purchase.

Important: you cannot set KPIs for sales, as they are influenced by many other factors that do not depend on SMM.

Liya Kanarskaya, remote SMM manager, says: “Very often you can hear this from potential clients:

• “Ten thousand will be a hundred thousand profit?”
• “Do you guarantee plus 1,000 subscribers?”
• “We will pay you a percentage of sales.”

But SMM affects sales and profits only indirectly. Social networks do not shape consumer needs; they are just one of the brand’s communication channels.”

• Traffic from social networks (Social Traffic).

In the first 2-3 months after creating a community, it’s definitely not a good idea to set strict requirements for traffic to the site for the text message operator. Keep in mind that building trust takes time: new subscribers are in no hurry to click on links to unfamiliar sites.

• Conversion rate or click-through rate (Click-Through Rate, CTR).

A basic indicator in internet marketing, it is used at almost all stages of the sales funnel.

CTR in SMM can be calculated as follows: divide the number of clicks on a link by the number of post impressions, and multiply the result by 100%. If the site is promoted by targeted advertising, the click-through rate is calculated in the same way: ad impressions are simply substituted into the denominator.

• Cost Per Click (CPC).

This indicator is known to everyone who has at least once set up targeted or contextual advertising. However, CPC can also be calculated for general SMM using the following formula: all expenses for maintaining social networks / number of clicks to the site.

• Number of leads (Leads).

The metric shows the number of contacts of potential clients, that is, the number of applications / orders / calls received through social networks.

• Cost per lead (CPL).

Formula: (amount of expenses / number of leads).

Leads and CPL are easy to calculate when managers process leads using social media apps. Try to offer potential clients as many options as possible for ordering: not everyone is comfortable filling out forms on landing pages or putting products in online store carts.

Let's touch on the topic of the number of KPIs once again.

Daria Samoilova, SMM manager of Netology, spoke especially for Texterra about her experience:

“For me personally, 5 metrics are optimal: website traffic, conversion to leads, subscriber growth, reach, Engagement Rate. This is a necessary basis from which the effectiveness of work can be seen without further ado.

Someone adds a breakdown to ER by indices of communication, gain, and involvement - that is, they count comments, reposts, and likes separately. Then there might be eight metrics.”

• Duration of work.
• Number of community members (as of the date the report was generated).
• Subscriber growth in 1 month.
• Full audience coverage.
• Number of unique visitors.
• The total number of views of posts.
• Number of posts (messages).
• News update frequency.
• Top 5 popular posts (by reach).

So, you have created a Twitter profile for your company, a group on Facebook and VKontakte is also in action. You answer (are you answering?) questions from your potential customers, use scheduled publishing services to post content on social networks at the ideal time, follow your target audience on Twitter to get 8-15% of the coveted return subscriptions, thank your fans for their support.

But beyond that, what are you doing to track the effectiveness of your social media activities and increase traffic and sales? If you engage your audience on social media, you must be able to calculate the end result. How else will you understand whether you are working in the right direction and whether your target audience wants to hear you and interact with you?

It sounds hard, but calculating social media marketing performance metrics is easier than it seems, with metrics like engagement rate, Reach and Follower Growth, Acquisition, and associative and direct conversions ( Assisted and Direct Conversion).

Assessing the effectiveness of social media marketing Engagement rate

Let's start with the well-known engagement rate. To understand whether your content is interesting to your audience, you can track engagement metrics such as the number of comments (conversation), approval or number of likes (applause), number of reposts (amplification). These metrics show the total amount of activity on your social media accounts. Do they mean anything on their own?

Considering separately the number of likes, reposts, comments, as well as the number of subscribers, one may encounter a misleading “theater of success”, in which the growth of individual metrics (from the number of likes to the number of subscribers and registrations) is considered as an undoubted indicator of the effectiveness of marketing on social networks. In reality, these indicators, isolated from other data, do not affect anything other than the WOW effect.

In turn, the total number of these metrics (volume) can be used to calculate more important metrics: engagement rate and (in some cases) cost of engagement.

The engagement rate answers two main questions:

• How relevant and interesting is the content you publish?
• Are you communicating with the people who really want to hear from you?

Depending on the final information you want to obtain, you can calculate your audience engagement by dividing the total number of likes, shares and comments over a certain period by the total reach, number of subscribers:

Engagement / Overall Reach

Calculating engagement rates based on the reach of your posts (both among subscribers and third-party audiences) is great for assessing the quality of content, but may no longer adequately reflect the situation as your reach increases significantly.

Engagement / Followers on a specific date

This method of calculation gives you a relatively stable indicator as a result, which allows you to assess how involved your already established audience is. By calculating it by day and presenting the results in a graph (you can monitor the changes in the SMM service KUKU.io), you can evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing recently and, by changing and supplementing it, monitor the growth or decline of engagement.

A formula that you have probably already come across:

The engagement rate can be calculated for paid campaigns by dividing the resulting engagement by the number of post views for a particular post, divided by the number of posts for a particular day. There are other ways depending on your goals.

At this stage, for paid social media campaigns (promotion of individual publications), the cost of engagement (volume of engagement / funds spent) can also be assessed. But is this assessment important if you can calculate the cost of a new subscriber who came from this campaign, as well as his conversion to the final goal - registration/purchase, etc.? Most likely, this assessment will be of interest only to the advertising agency and its clients (correct in the comments if wrong).

The engagement rate is influenced, first of all, by the content you publish, the time at which you publish, and your understanding of the audience you are targeting.

The growth in the number of subscribers also affects the final percentage of engagement, but often not in the direction you might expect. With every new subscriber general characteristics your audience is changing, and by dividing engagement by the increased number of subscribers and reach, we get a smaller final result. These indicators should be considered together.

Reach and Follower Growth

Most companies set the main goal of their presence on social networks to generate leads. But let's start from the very beginning. To start driving social media traffic to your website or making immediate sales, you need (engaged) followers and reach.

Reach refers to the number of unique users who saw your content. Reach affects everything: engagement, likes, comments, clicks, feedback, engagement.

The coverage can be either a specific publication or your page as a whole. Why is it important to separate? By publishing once a week, your post may get a lot of reach, but your page reach will be extremely low. If you post too often (say 5 times a day), the low reach of individual posts will be offset by the high reach of your page. Should we go to the extreme? Of course, it is best to find a middle ground.

On Facebook, reach is also divided into organic (people who saw your post in their feed), viral (the user’s friends saw the post in their feed when the user commented on the post or shared it), paid (reach of promoted posts).

One of the trends in recent years is the rapid decline in Facebook’s organic reach. And it seems to me that the English definition of what is happening on Facebook is incredibly accurate - “pay-to-play” (“pay to play”).

Favorite. Potential reach. Unfortunately, the potential reach offered by social networks is beautiful numbers, divorced from reality. You can post super-viral event content, but you won't come close to the impressive numbers that social media touts for you. Your audience growth and engagement metrics, while not as glamorous, are a more realistic measure of your potential reach.

To assess potential coverage outside of your subscribers and increasing your audience you can start by counting the number of friends of your engaged followers, the audience estimate of your competitors, and the count of engaged users who are not yet your followers. Reinforce the information received by segmenting users by involvement and geography, compare the portraits of old subscribers and new ones.

By identifying and studying the main groups you need to influence, you can independently evaluate potential reach and create your own truly effective list of growth hacks for social networks.

Attracting clients (Acquisition)

Despite the fact that user traffic from social networks in most cases is significantly inferior to organic traffic from search engines, the percentage of repeat visits from social networks is several times higher than that of Google. You can check this in Google Analytics right now.

When talking about attracting users from social networks, it is impossible not to start with the frequency of clicks to your website. The metric divides visits to your site into two main categories: new and repeat. While repeat clicks reflect the effectiveness of your social media content and audience engagement, new clicks show whether by increasing your “reach” you are actually getting more clicks.

What can influence user acquisition from social networks? Of course, first and foremost is the content you publish and how you interact with your audience.

Among the many strategies for increasing conversions from social networks, I find especially interesting:

Twitter.

Participate in Twitter chats. Twitter chats are a great way to interact with a large number of people at once who are (or might be) interested in your product. The more you participate in Twitter chats, the more you will be recognized. You can also use chats to promote your blog articles that are relevant to the chat topic. you can find a large list of popular chat rooms.

Influence on opinion leaders. Highlight influential people in your field and people who frequently mention topics of interest to you keywords, and add them to private Twitter lists. Contact 2-3 people on your list per day. In this case, the tweets do not necessarily have to be related to your brand and can cover related topics. If you still want to post links to your site without looking like a spammer, try linking to useful content on your blog.

Facebook and VKontakte.

80% of social media users prefer to connect with brands through Facebook and VKontakte. Why? Because it's faster than via email. 50% expect to receive support on social media, and only 23% of brands with a social media presence actually provide it. You've probably heard that the experience of poor support goes away very quickly. But fortunately, positive experiences spread very quickly, too, word of mouth works. Users want to communicate with you through social networks, so give them this opportunity.

For LinkedIn, the main attraction strategies could be finding and meeting influential people, participating in group discussions, reposting your blog articles, etc.

All social media engagement strategies are truly worthy of their own column. But I would like to return to evaluating effectiveness. Will you take the quality of the relationships being built as a criterion? No. When talking about efficiency and ROI, you compare money and time spent with specific goals achieved.

Because any relationship built with an audience on social networks is useless without conversion. So if you decide to measure referral traffic from social networks, take it a step further and measure the final conversion in registration or purchase.

Direct and associated conversion (Conversion)

Let's start this block with the four main ways social media users can come to your website:

Social network > Direct link to the site

Social network > Blog article with link to home page> Lead

Social network > Gated content (in order to get to an article or download something, you need to log in or leave information about yourself) > Lead

Social network > Blog article > Registration form posted on the blog

The paths are different and not all will instantly lead to the desired effect - registration, sales, etc. Before attracting users to your site and making them return, you must clearly define your ultimate goal: what kind of conversion do you want to see in sales or other desired actions?

At the same time, you need to decide for yourself that transitions and conversion will not be achieved solely by selling posts, because constantly posting such content is the surest way to lose your audience.

You can start calculating conversion from the last click, transitions from social networks to your links, attaching UTM tags to them. But direct clicks don't tell the full story of how effectively you're building relationships and creating a loyal audience for your brand on social media.

Most of your posts and tweets won't get you a sale, but you can close your target with potential customers who visit your site again. At this point Google Analytics Associated Conversions appear:

Assisted conversions occur when a user visits your site, then leaves without converting, but then returns and completes the conversion. The higher these values, the more contribution the social network makes.

By comparing Assisted Conversions to Google Analytics Last Click Conversions, you can determine which social networks are ideal for maintaining relationships with existing customers and which ones are ideal for generating and generating new business.

So, when you know and are able to calculate these indicators, the activity of your subscribers on social networks ceases to be an ephemeral indicator of effectiveness, the “theater of success”, and becomes the basis for calculating engagement and ROI, assessing the quality of incoming traffic, as well as the effectiveness of your content marketing.