Social media might not always feel like the right place for small businesses, especially service-driven businesses. However, social media is a powerful tool to complement your other marketing efforts. In fact, in 2022, small businesses cited social media as their most successful digital marketing tool. But defining success in social media can be tricky, so we’ve put together some info on the value of social media and the right metrics to measure your success.

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The Value of Social Media

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1. Awareness - Social media is one of the best ways to get your business out to a broader audience and stay top-of-mind with your current clients. Whether you’re posting informative or fun content, your business’s name being seen in the feed helps build awareness for your business. It can be easy to think that a post only has value if it gets a lot of engagement, but there is also value to being seen. You likely don’t engage with every post you see, but chances are, you still remember seeing a lot of them. So keep in mind that posting regularly has a cumulative impact, not always an overnight one.

2. Reputation Building - Having a solid social media presence is also a great way to manage your online reputation and presence. Clients can leave reviews on your Facebook page, just like Google, to help your business stand out. They can also easily share your posts with their friends, giving your business some amazing word-of-mouth marketing. An often overlooked value of social media is its ability to give you a platform to share your expertise and thought leadership around your industry. Not only will this help differentiate you when prospects are deciding among businesses, but it can keep clients engaged and trusting that they’re in good hands.

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3. Connection - One of the best things about social media is that it allows 1:1 connection that isn’t possible through some other marketing mediums. Not only can your clients like, comment, and share, but you can respond back and nurture your relationship with them. It can even help you get to know more about what your clients care about. If you notice that every time you post about a certain topic, you get more engagement, you can make note of that topic to use for additional marketing efforts or even to add to your website. Social media can function as a mini focus group, so be sure to really pay attention to what works and what doesn’t to inform future marketing.

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Measuring Success

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When looking at how social media is performing, it can be tempting to only look at likes. While they are important, there are other metrics you should be looking at to get the full picture for how social media is helping your business. 

• Impressions/Reach - Impressions are the total views of your content, whereas reach is the total unique views of your content. So if your post has 500 impressions and 250 reach, that means each person saw it twice. Keep in mind that different platforms have different metrics so you may not be able to view the same metric across the board. These are great metrics to see how many people your content is reaching, which ultimately generates awareness.

• Engagements - Most platforms define engagements as actions taken on a post, such as likes, comments, shares, clicks, photo views, video views, etc. This is a great metric to see how engaged your audience is. Take note of what gets the most engagements vs. least and work that into your future content.

• Shares - Shares are technically part of engagements, but looking at them separately is a good idea since a share is the ultimate action you’d want your audience to take. This is like word-of-mouth marketing for your business!

• Clicks - Clicks are also part of engagements, but it can be good to take a look at which posts are getting the most click-throughs and least click-throughs. You may find certain subjects lead to more clicks and can use that to plan future content, if driving website visits is important to you.

• Followers - While this shouldn’t be your main metric, keeping an eye on your follower count is always good so you can see the cumulative impact your content is having over time. The more consistent you are with your content, and the better quality content you put out, the more you should see your follower count rise organically.

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Social media is an amazing tool for small businesses, and we hope that this breakdown of its value will inspire you to give it the effort it deserves. And, don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be hard or time-consuming—Levitate makes social media marketing efficient and easy. Want to see for yourself? Book a demo, and we’d be happy to show you.

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