4 Risks Of Not Tracking Your Social Media Strategy

At Hyperchat Social, one of our main focuses is building marketing strategies from scratch to provide the results that our clients are looking for. A big part of what we do is tracking the results of the different aspects of our strategy for clients to see what is producing the results most in line with our client's goals. A big mistake that we often see with business owners trying to build their own social media strategies, is not tracking the analytics or results they are seeing on a regular basis.

What do we mean by tracking the results or analytics? The answer can vary business to business, because every business has different goals for social. Whether it be growing your following, boosting your exposure or overall reach, or even increasing sales on your website.

So what are the risks of not tracking your social media strategy?

You will have no idea where you started.

One of the biggest obstacles, and one of the biggest mistakes that you can make when starting out with your social media strategy, is not taking baseline numbers for key performance metrics associated with your goals. This includes follower count, engagement rate, impressions on your page, the average reach of your content, and even website analytics on Google Analytics.

If you do not know where you started, it is extremely hard to prove that what you're doing on social is achieving your goals. Having access to these baseline numbers will allow you to accurately report growth in key performance metrics month after month.

Pro-tip: If you did not record key performance metrics at the start of your campaign, there are some analytics reports that will allow you to filter by date. If you'd like to see where you started, filter the analytics report to only include activity before you started your social media strategy. Try keeping these metrics on a spreadsheet that you can reference time and time again.

You won't know what works and what doesn't.

When creating a social media strategy, it can feel a lot like trial and error. Well, I hate to break it to you, but that's because it is. What works for the business down the street might not work for your brand and what works for your brand might not work for the business down the street. But how are you supposed to know what it's actually working and what it's not? The answer is probably more simple than it seems: By tracking what changes you make to a campaign and how it's affecting your key performance metrics.

By benchmarking the results you're seeing on your campaign monthly, or even weekly, you can look back to see what changes you made to the campaign or strategy in the last month to see how it affected the results you're seeing. From there, you can adjust your strategy based on what you're seeing the best results with.

You won't know where to focus your marketing efforts.

If you're not tracking your campaign results, there's no way for you to know what is working and what isn't. In turn, you'll have no idea where to focus your marketing efforts. It's extremely hard, let alone time-consuming, to be present and active on all platforms as a brand. So, it is good to know what aspects of your marketing strategy are providing the return you're looking for. Whether that's your content schedule, your paid social strategy, or something as simple as what email subject line you are using in your drip campaigns - it is important to track and attribute the results you're seeing.

For example, let's say you own a beauty company and a large focus of yours is on Instagram. You post meaningful content on a consistent basis, but your reach is low and no one is visiting your profile. For this example, let's say your average reach is about 500 per post - meaning on average 500 people see your post organically in their feed. As a part of your strategy, you boost a few of these posts and now your reach has doubled to 1k. Then you decide to post a Reel to Instagram using a trending sound. This Reel reached 12k people without using any of your marketing dollars. Since you are tracking your analytics monthly or weekly (like you should), you track that the day you posted the Reel, you gained 30 new followers. This would be an indicator that you should include more Reels in your social strategy. Once you find a strategy that works for you, simply scale it up and repeat for maximum results.

You will spend too much time and money on things that aren't working.

If you're not tracking your social strategy, you are at risk of spending too much time and too much money on strategies that may not be best for your brand or product. Creating a social media strategy is all about finding what your audience and ideal target client will respond best to. How are you supposed to know what they are responding best to if you're not tracking the results that you're seeing? You can throw money at the wall all day long and hope something sticks, but that will come with a lot of frustration when you see no return on your investment with marketing. By tracking your results on a regular basis, you can see which efforts are worth putting both your time and marketing dollars into.

As we have discussed, tracking your social media marketing strategy is vital. Remember to always take baseline numbers of key performance metrics so you know where you started. By tracking your analytics and metrics, you will be able to be strategic about where you invest your time and money when it comes to social media. If you would like us to handle the tracking, reporting, and adjusting for you and take a backseat to your social strategy, schedule a free consultation to Turn Social Into Sales!