If you are going to be serious about social media marketing, then you need to track your successes and your failures. By not tracking results, you have no idea what is working and what isn’t. If you spend thousands of dollars on print ads, then you will definitely be tracking how much they helped your business, so why wouldn’t you do the same for online marketing? A few years ago, social media was primarily a testing and experimentation environment because businesses didn’t really understand how to use them. Moreover, they didn’t really understand which metrics provided the most valuable data. Here is a closer look at 3 key social media metrics that you absolutely need to know.

1.Monthly Impressions

One of the most difficult things to do is determine your true reach through social media. With social monthly impressions, you can definitely track individual results, but this should focus more on your entire visibility. The problem is that monitoring your social monthly impressions is still a little inexact because you can’t track the entire web. It just isn’t possible. Essentially, you are going to track how often your brand or business is mentioned on blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook, and other related social media outlets. Tracking this can be difficult, but is well worth it. The reason that this is important to know is that it will give you a baseline about how often other people are talking about you. Remember, the entire point of being social is to allow others to do the promoting for you. Social Monthly Impressions is one of the best ways to get an understanding of whether or not this is happening.

2.Total Size of Your Community

The next thing that you need to pay attention to is your total online community size. Again, this is a big picture look at your overall social media efforts. This might be one of the easiest things to track. All you need to do is add together all of your followers and connections throughout all of your social media outlets. For example, you can add together your Twitter Followers, Facebook Fans, YouTube Channel Subscribers, size of your blog users/forum members, etc. This won’t tell you how active your community is, but it will give you a better idea of how far your reach is. If possible, track your top 3 or 5 competitors and use them to get an idea of how successful are you or how much larger you need to grow to be on equal footing with them.

3.Referred Traffic to Website/Landing Page

Finally, you need to track how much targeted traffic you are getting from your social media profiles. You can either track your referrals to your entire website or to a specific set of landing pages. Regardless, this will tell you a few things. The first thing that this will tell you is how effective your social media profiles are at driving traffic to your website. Second, it will give you a better idea of how active your followers actually are. Finally, it will give you a better baseline so that when you experiment with different social media promotional strategies, you will get a better idea about what is working and what isn’t. Split testing is nearly impossible with social media traffic, so this metric is as close as you can get to achieving it.

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