Many financial advisors fail to see the value in social media marketing—as it seems too personal, fluffy, and juvenile. There is also a lot of ambiguity about how to track the quantitative effectiveness of social media marketing efforts. If you’re one of the skeptics (like I once was), I am here to share with you some analytics and metrics that are the cream o’ the crop when it comes to measuring the success and performance of your social campaigns. They will unquestionably give you something to be thankful for when it comes to seeing the tangible results of your social initiatives.
Facebook Analytics: “Facebook Analytics” is a valuable and comprehensive tool that helps businesses determine how effective their Facebook efforts are. The tool aggregates data on the # of likes, weekly total reach (includes demographics and location), and people talking about your business. It also contains data about the effectiveness of your postings—such as how many people it reached, how many people engaged, and post virility.
To truly understand what works on your Facebook page, aim to keep track of trends, themes, and patterns in how users engage with your content. Does your overall engagement go up when you post 3x per day as opposed to 2x? Does your audience engage with content about college savings more than retirement? The more data you collect and analyze, the more you’ll learn about your audience and their needs!
Followers: This seems obvious, but it’s important to cover! Tracking followers on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (and Pinterest if you’re brave) is a great way to see how well your business is promoting and growing your social business pages. If you notice a plateau in follower growth, access the possible reasons and trends that may play a role. Reversely, if you notice an incline in “likes”, “followers”, and “connections” –take note of what you did differently that month or week to cause the spike.
Remember, tis’ more important to have engaged followers than disengaged followers—so don’t make this metric the sole determinant of how successful your social media pages are.
@replies, re-tweets, and @mentions: @replies , re-tweets, and @mentions on Twitter are a great indicator of how strong and interesting your business’ content is. Monitor the increases and decreases in @replies and @mentions on your Twitter handle to see what type of content and language resonates with your audience the most.
Once you get a clearer picture of how engaged your audience, create monthly and/or weekly goals for increasing engagement and interest.
LinkedIn Company page views and followers: Didn’t think you could track engagement and followers on LinkedIn? Think again! With the LinkedIn company pages, businesses can monitor page visits, followers, unique visitors, visitor demographics, and clicks on products and services pages. This data provides valuable insight about who is interested in your company the most. It also is a great indicator of how well you are driving traffic to your LinkedIn page via other channels.
Unique website visits: Many businesses don’t monitor their unique and/or repeating website visitors. Both metrics are very important for distinct reasons. Unique website visits represent the total number of individual visitors that visit your website during a specific period of time, not counting repeat visits. This metric is an awesome indicator how well your content and marketing campaigns are driving traffic to your site.
Look for an increase in unique website visits as you increase your use of social media marketing, during events & speaking engagements, and during major promotions.
Repeating website visits: Repeating website visits are a great indicator of how “sticky” your website is. If you have a high number of unique visitors, but a low number of repeat visits, it might be time to re-vamp your website and create more intriguing, engaging content on a consistent basis to keep people coming back.
Reversely, if you have a high number of repeat visits, but a low number of unique—it may mean you should increase your efforts to promote your website via other promotional channels.
Organic Traffic: No, organic traffic does not refer to pesticides or GMO’s. In fact, it refers to the number of visits your site gets as a direct result of search engines. For instance, if Mary Smith Google’s “retirement advisor in Hartford” and your business is the first thing that Mary clicks on, that would be considered an organic visit.
Organic traffic is a great yardstick for measuring the effectiveness of your Search Engine Optimization efforts.
If organic traffic is high, give yourself a pat on the back. If it’s really low, it may be time to do have an SEO overhaul!
On the outside, social media marketing may seem like another form technology to add to the noise—if that’s your opinion—test it for yourself using these analytics. You’ll probably be thankful! 
Amy McIlwain
@amymcilwain
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