The Value of Social Media Engagement
You’ve created your editorial calendar, solidified your target audience, written content for posting, and gathered your repurposed articles. Now what? Once you’ve created a solid online presence, you shouldn’t disregard all the work you put into it. How is your target audience engaging with your social media posts? Are they clicking links, liking, and commenting on your posts? Knowing this information grants you the opportunity to discover what your audience and prospects are interested in. Tracking your social media engagement is important and only helps your staffing firm in the long run.
Where to Start
Social media is all about connecting with your target audience. In order to properly connect with them, you need to be knowledgeable about their interests and their actions on social media. Luckily, there is an easy way to find this out. The primary social media platforms, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, all offer insights and analytics. This function allows you to track your followers and observe their actions in regard to your posts.
If you are listed as an admin on your staffing firm’s LinkedIn page, you have the ability to check the analytics of each post. It’s simple; you scroll to your post, click on “show stats” at the bottom of the individual post, and you are opened up to the post’s analytics. These analytics show the organic impressions of the post, which eludes to how many users saw the post on their home page. It also shows you how many reactions, comments, shares, and clicks the post received as well as the click-through rate and engagement rate.
If you are an admin of your staffing firm’s Facebook page, you are allowed similar features to those of LinkedIn. At the bottom of each post, you see the number of how many users the post reached, and the number of users that engaged with the post. By clicking on the number of engagements, you are led to a pop-up that dives deeper into your social media engagement analytics. Here, you are shown how many likes, comments, and shares the post received. You are also able to view the amount of post clicks it received and what kind of click it was whether it was a “photo view”, a direct “link click”, or an “other click”. Facebook analytics also offers you the ability to view if your post received negative feedback. Negative feedback includes someone hiding the post from their timeline so they are unable to view it, a user reporting the post as spam, or someone unliking your page as a result of a particular post.
Twitter offers the same analytics on social media engagement as any other platform. Because the features of Twitter are different than those of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, you are offered different features in your insights. By clicking on the bar graph on the bottom right of a twitter post, you are opened up to that posts analytics. This shows you the number of impressions the post made (meaning how many timelines the post was viewed on), the amount of profile clicks your page received due to this post, as well as the amount of likes, retweets, link clicks, detail expands, hashtag clicks, replies, and media engagements the post got.
Lastly, Instagram, as you may have guessed, offers similar analytic functions that show social media engagement. By clicking on an individual post, and clicking “view insights”, you are opened up to the number of likes, comments, and saves the post received. Along with this, you are able to view the overall actions that were caused as a result of this post. These actions include profile visits and new follows as a result of posting that photo.
Benefits of Tracking Social Media Engagement
Now that we all know where to find the social media engagement your posts received, where do we go next? The analytics of each social media post offers great benefits to your staffing firm and allows you to figure out what your next move is in your digital marketing strategy. Social media analytics shows you how to engage better with your audience. You are able to view what posts create the most engagement and what posts don’t do as well. Use this information to guide your editorial calendar. By seeing what creates the most engagement and traffic back to your page or website, you can choose your content more wisely as you know it’s what your audience wants to see. As a result, you are able to build upon your posts engagement and create new leads.
A client of ours recently conducted a study on their social media engagement. This study took all posts from each of their platforms from the past year and recorded each posts’ engagement analytics. Through the creation of this spreadsheet, the company was able to clearly see what topics, keywords, hashtags, etc. received the most engagement. Having this knowledge proved to be beneficial as the company was able to tailor future posts and content with the interests of their audience. This resulted in an overall increase in customer engagement and followers on each social platform.
Having access to the social media engagement for each of your posts creates lasting benefits for your social media presence. Analyzing the engagements shows you what your future leads want to see. After reviewing your analytics, evaluate your editorial calendar and social media content. Is it creating the engagement your staffing firm wants and needs? If not, give us a call and we will lead you in the right direction.
About S.J.Hemley Marketing
S.J.Hemley Marketing is a marketing and sales consulting firm focused on driving tangible results for professional services firms. Brand matters, but not without ROI. With over 20 years of sales and marketing experience within staffing and recruiting, we have helped to drive successful branding, sales training, lead generation activities as well as defining marketing strategy for top organizations. www.sjhemleymarketing.com