I’m preparing to hit the road for 10 days delivering social media training and on the one long weekend that I really just wanted to enjoy time with family, I came down with a head cold.
Lying around not feeling like doing anything is a great time to catch up on reading and several blogs came across my path over the last few days all with a similar theme – how do you know if you’re social media account is sick?
The key symptoms would be that you’re losing likes and followers and your engagement levels are low. Or it may simply be that your likes, reach and impressions are still okay, but your engagement levels are low. Either way, you have a problem. It means you simply aren’t producing interesting enough content for people to engage with – this means sharing/retweeting/regramming (#1), commenting/replying (#2) and liking/favouriting (#3).
Just like the must-do, annual check up with the doctor, you must check into your social media analytics at least once a month. If you’re developing content a month in advance, you need to know how you’re tracking before you start work on that next month.
The numbers in isolation over one month won’t mean much, you need to watch for trends over time. You should also take the time to dig a little deeper from time to time to get some qualitative information about how you’re performing by tracking conversations about your brand, looking at the context in which people are talking about you and watching the tone of the conversations that take place on your channels.
Looking for help with this? Check out the workshops page for training options or contact me.
Kim V. Goldsmith 