1. READ ALL ABOUT IT
First things first, you’ll need to take an active look at the platforms you are currently using to get a firm grasp of which posts have performed the best on each of your platforms. Are you getting tons of likes on text posts, but your images go unnoticed? Do your afternoon Instagram posts get lots of engagement but morning posts are less stellar? Take some time to look at the trends developing on your platforms.
2. GET SMART
Before you start measuring, you’ll need to set some SMART goals. “CMi,” you say, “why would we set dumb goals?” Of course you wouldn’t, friend! But in this case we mean smart SMART goals: Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Timed. To most efficiently measure your progress you’ll need to establish what kind results you want to see, such as increasing awareness, generating x amount of small group form-fills and/or retaining existing church members. Using the SMART guidelines will help you focus in on what you want to achieve and how you can get there.
3. TOOLS TO MEASURE RESULTS
Now it’s time to get into the nitty gritty. Reports, numbers, conversions. Luckily there are a range of tools that can help you assess your profiles and translate that info into useful reports. If you’re already using scheduling tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer, there are analytic tools built in to the software. These platforms allow you schedule your content across multiple platforms and will even provide you with suggestions for optimal times to post. If you’re not using these tools yet there are still options!
- Facebook Insights: If you log into your Facebook account and have access to your page, there is an “Insights” tab that has tons of information and helpful stats. Using our Facebook page as an example, you can locate that tab here
- Google Analytics is mainly recognized as a very comprehensive web analytics tool. However, it does provide some social media analytics too. Some excellent features this free tool provides include: segmenting traffic for particular channels, viewing real-time traffic and setting up goals to track conversion rates broken down by social channels.
4. GOOD BEHAVIOR
Now that you know what’s going on in your social profiles and have set measurable goals it’s time to look at correlations. Check out behavior on your website that is driven by social exchanges. What posts are getting people to your website? What are people doing when they get there? How long do they stick around and in what part of the site? By establishing the behavior of visitors from social media, you can start to assess what makes them tick and begin to use that information to begin tailoring posts to the audience’s specific needs and interests.
Success on social will look different for organizations depending on what it is they want to accomplish. With the tools above and organizing your ministry’s goals, you can start to leverage your social profiles and see measurable results across platforms.
