Running a business means there’s no shortage of numbers to crunch.
From your shop’s labor rate to your gross profit, shop owners have seemingly infinite options for stats to track and analyze. And while most shop owners know the key performance indicators (KPIs) to track out on the shop floor, measuring success on social media is a whole nother story.
“It can be overwhelming,” says Kim Walker, co-owner of Shop Marketing Pros. “As a shop owner you’re busy all day long. You’ve got fires to put out, whether you’re helping customers or helping your staff or managing your financials finding time to track your social media can be difficult.”
As former shop owners turned marketing experts, Walker and her husband Brian offered up a few key tips in a 2021 VISION Hi-Tech Training and Expo session today to help shop owners hone in on and measure the social media metrics that matter most.
Think outside your following.
“When it comes to how you're performing on social media, likes and follows are not the most important,” Walker said. “A lot of shop owners will come to us with growing their social media following as their top goal and your following is important, but metrics like reach and engagement are going to make a bigger impact.”
Walker advised shop owners to rank post reach and engagement as higher priorities when it comes to measuring and modifying your social media performance.
“If you’re just focused on your number of followers, you’re just thinking in terms of the number of people who have followed your page, but growing your reach is growing the number of people actually being exposed to your posts, which means people who don’t even follow you are seeing your posts.”
Walker also advised prioritizing engagement—the actual action users take in deciding to like, comment or share your shop’s post.
“I really advise folks to pay attention to how they’re interacting with content when they’re scrolling in their own personal Facebook time,” she said. “Pay attention to what it is that actually causes you to slow your scroll. What is it about those posts that makes you stop and actually click on or interact with a post the way you did? That’s what you want to emulate.”
Track your losses.
While it’s helpful to track your page’s growth, Walker advises keeping an eye on the number of followers you’re losing day to day to piece together trends in your posts that might be driving followers away.
“For the most part, you're going to have someone unfollow you here and there. Maybe someone moved and your business is no longer relevant to them, but what you're really looking for is a spike in those unlikes,” she said. “Maybe on March 4, you had 15 people unlike your page. That’s a time to go back and ask ‘What did I post? Was it controversial?’ or ‘What time of day did I post?’
Boost what works.
As shop owners begin tracking their engagement and reach, Walker not only also advised paying close attention to the type of posts that are performing well on your page, and paying to promote or boost those that are naturally gaining a foothold with your following.
“A lot of people think you can boost a poorly-performing post to make it go farther, but if a post is not doing well and you pay to boost it, you’re really just paying for it to do fine,” she said. “Boosting won’t really help that post or you. You’re much better off boosting posts that were already gaining traction organically so they can perform even better.”
Whether pictures, videos or comments and conversations with your followers brings in the most reach and engagement to your page, the posts that are already performing best on your page will be the best candidate to launch on a larger audience.
Book an appointment with yourself.
Walker advised that shop owners check the performance of their key metrics at least once a week, but if once a week is not possible, you can make do checking once per month.
“The trick is to dedicate that time by blocking it off on your calendar. Maybe that’s you putting an event on your calendar and marking yourself as away or out of the office during that time so other people wont’ be able to book anything during that time,” she said. “The key is to cut out any distractions and give yourself some grace while you start getting into this routine.”
