Go Beyond Counting Likes To Maximize Your Social Media Efforts!

Realize Social Media Isn't About "the Clicks"

Clicks to purchase, clicks to sign up, clicks to email, clicks to just about anything from the customer's end rarely happen on the first exposure with any customer in social media. Social media isn't about getting customers to immediately click over to your own site; email and search marketing (both paid and organic) should be filling that need in your marketing plan.

Social media marketing takes time to develop the successful results you aim for to improve your bottom line. It takes time to develop trust, it takes time to develop relationships, it takes time for customers to really like you as a company. Sure, they may retweet one of your media pieces or pin one of your photos, but what happens to the relationship after that?

Avinash  Kaushik says this about companies who count likes and measure that as success:
"What can you measure to show value: Do. Not. Measure. Likes.

Declaring success based on measuring Likes in aggregate is like declaring success after getting a lot of Visits to your site. SO WHAT - Because once I press Like I might never come back, never read anything you write, never ever engage with you, not even remember you exist."

The problem with counting likes is that counting that "click" doesn't get you anywhere. The person clicking the like might do it once to see what content you have that you're hiding from them, or they might click it once to get a coupon, watch a video, or see a photo.
After that what happens? What action have they done beyond clicking that little like button?

If you aren't engaging your audience, not much is going to happen with all of those people clicking the like button. If you aren't cultivating your avid fans into true ambassadors for your brand that action of clicking the like button (or "follow," "friend," etc.) doesn't mean a heck of a lot…to your bottom line.

Likely not, unless you've already realized that more important measures are things like "how many are talking about this" or "reach" in Facebook Insights.

Take those measurements a step further and look and see what people from social media sites are doing when you lead them over to your own site. How valuable are they to you? When you segment out your visitors coming from social media sites and their actions, you can create a much better picture of success (or failure) with what you're implementing in social media.

Check your Google Analytics to see how the visits from Social Media sites are engaging your web site.
Looking at things like time on site, number of pages visited, visitor loyalty, and even navigational paths can give you a much more rounded picture of success in any social media channel; much better than counting likes. When you combine factors of how many new followers you gained during a certain time frame and look at what's happening on your own site, that's when you can begin to draw conclusions about what you're implementing and how it affects your bottom line when it comes to "counting those likes."

When you dig deeper into understanding the data behind what you're doing you not only can figure out what is currently working, but it can also help you map a path for future success.

Go beyond counting the likes!