What are your measurements of success?

If you know what your social media goals are, you can measure your success.  You can count the number of fans, monitor the amount of participation, track actions taken or consider other metrics when evaluating the effectiveness of your efforts. What are the success metrics for your station online?

Many social media sites have useful metrics and counters to give you information about your visitors. There is also a host of specialist social media metric tools online, paid or subscription, offering simple or sophisticated monitoring of social media channels.  Information can include how many unique views you’ve had and what content your fans are engaged with, but they also provide information about the flow-on benefits, such as website visits and membership numbers.

Analytics and monitoring tools

Here are just some of the available tools:

• Google Alerts: Setting up Google Alerts for your radio station name, program names and events names will help you to see what is being said about you online, including in social media platforms
• Google Analytics: If you set up Google Analytics (for free) on your website you will be able to track traffic coming to your radio station website via your social media profiles
• bitly.com: bitly is a simple url shortener to track clicks and shares on all of your links
• Klout: This online tool helps you to find the people who are most active and influential in your social media networks. It also rates your performance in social media
• Hootsuite: This online tool gives you a dashboard to follow all of your profiles and you can also schedule some of your social media posts in the same tool. There is some free reporting available with Hootsuite and more detailed reports if you are willing to pay for the basic membership.
• Analytics within social media platforms: Some social media platforms, including Facebook and LinkedIn have fairly sophisticated analytics that are very intuitive

 Top tips

• Set up a social media dashboard of all your favourite tools so that you can post, monitor and track your success.
• Make the most of the many free and comprehensive measurement tools for social media. If you’re not sure how to use them look for a forum and ask questions or do a Google search to find the answer.
• Aside from just the numbers, monitor your responses and the communication from followers – are you getting the kind of interaction you’d hoped for?  Which kind of posts resonate with your fans?  How can you use this information to improve your future posts?
• Get into the habit of reporting monthly on your key metrics. This will help your team see how social media is benefiting your station and to allocate resources accordingly.

Learn more

• 9 Ways to Measure Your Brand’s Social Media Health: Mashable
• Social Media Monitoring 101 – How to Get Started: Social Media Examiner

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