How To Tell If Your Social Media Efforts Are Working

What's Happening 

As a busy entrepreneur, time is your most precious resource. Growing your social media following requires an enormous amount of time to complete each post. If you don’t stop to evaluate, you could be completely wasting your time on initiatives that aren’t getting results.

In January, I recommend evaluating each social media platform you’re active on, their performance in 2022, and how you might show up (or not) on those platforms this year.

Use it for Your Business

I do this exercise with my clients each January. We review our stats document from the previous year, paying particular attention to the following for each platform:

• year-over-year growth
• engagement rate
• reach rate
• click-through rate
• best-performing posts

Pro Tip: If you haven't been tracking these stats throughout the year, you can compile them from the insights/analytics section on each social media platform. If you’re not sure whether your stats are “good” or not, you can find industry benchmarks in reports like this one, this one or this one. Or, Google the stat you’re looking for.

We then discuss questions such as:

• Which types of content worked and which didn’t?
• Which content categories should we kill, and which new ones could we try?
• Are we getting a return on our effort? On which platforms should we reduce or increase our presence?
• Who can we approach for collaborations this year?
• What are our business goals for this year? How can we shape our social strategy to support them?

I use our observations to create an action plan for the first quarter, adjusting the content calendar and posting schedules.

Relevancy Rating

Just because it's new doesn't mean it's worth your time: Is reviewing 2022’s social performance worth your time?

Yes!: I give it 5 out of 5 thumbs up.

An ounce of prevention is always worth a pound of cure. Taking an hour to evaluate your social effectiveness over the year will save you countless hours creating ineffective social posts.

Social media is constantly changing. Sign up for This Week in Social Media Marketing to stay informed of the trends and decide whether it’s worth your time to try them.