You’re posting consistently. Your business is showing up on social media. Some posts do well, others disappear without much of a trace.
But how do you know if any of it is actually working?
It’s a question I think a lot of businesses struggle to answer, because we’ve become very used to judging social media by the numbers sitting right in front of us: the vanity metrics
How many followers do we have? How many people saw that Reel? Why did that post only get three likes when the one before it got 23?
Those numbers aren’t irrelevant, but on their own they don’t tell us very much about whether social media is doing anything useful for the business.
And they definitely don’t mean you need to go viral to have a successful online presence.
Before you can decide whether your social media is working, there’s a much more important question to answer.
What do you actually want it to do?
Not every post needs to generate leads
Ultimately, your marketing needs to help your business make money. I’m not going to tell you that sales don’t matter, of course they do.
But expecting someone to see a post on Tuesday morning and immediately book your service worth thousands of dollars is probably asking too much of that post.
Think about the last service you paid a decent amount of money for. Did you see one Instagram post and immediately hand over your money?
Or did you come across the business somewhere, have a look at what they did, perhaps follow them for a while, visit their website, read some of their content, look at their reviews or hear someone else mention them?
By the time you eventually enquired, you may have had quite a few interactions with that business.
Social media can be one part of that process.
It can introduce someone to your business in the first place, give them reasons to keep paying attention and help them understand what you know and how you work. When the time comes that they actually need what you sell, you’re not a complete stranger.
None of that requires every post to produce an enquiry.
So what was the post supposed to do?
This is something businesses could ask much more often.
Let’s say you share a useful blog post on LinkedIn. It gets three likes.
Failure?
Not necessarily.
If 10 people clicked through to your website to read it without hitting “like” or commenting, I’d be far more interested in that than the number of likes it received.
The same applies in the other sense. A Reel could get 10,000 views and look impressive in your monthly report. But if almost everyone watching it was completely irrelevant to your business and nobody took another step to become a customer afterwards, how valuable were those 10,000 views?
This is why I don’t particularly like looking at a piece of content and declaring that it “did well” without any context.
What was the intention behind that post?
If we wanted to reach people who hadn’t heard of the business before, we should be looking at whether it did that.
If we were trying to get people to visit a particular page on the website, clicks suddenly become more important.
If we wanted to start a conversation around something our customers care about, ten thoughtful comments from the right people might be an excellent result.
And if we were promoting a particular product or service, of course we want to know whether people showed some interest in buying it.
It sounds obvious when you put it like that, but it’s easy to get distracted by the biggest number on the screen.
Posting more isn’t necessarily the answer
This is where businesses can get stuck.
Social media isn’t producing the results they hoped for, so the solution becomes more social media.
We need to post more often. We need more Reels. We need to get onto TikTok. We need to grow our followers.
Maybe…
But before creating more of anything, I’d want to know what the existing content is actually doing.
Perhaps plenty of people are seeing it, but they have no reason to take the next step.
Perhaps you’re attracting an audience that was never likely to buy from you in the first place.
Perhaps your content is useful but nobody ever knows what you sell.
Or perhaps social media is actually doing its job perfectly well, but you’re expecting it to do the job of your website, email marketing and sales process as well.
Creating more content won’t automatically fix any of those problems.
You need to know what you’re trying to fix first.
Your social media doesn’t work alone
This is probably the part that gets forgotten.
Don’t think of social media as a little marketing island where everything needs to happen.
Someone might discover your business through a LinkedIn post and end up on your website. They read a blog, disappear for a while and then come across you again later. At some point they join your email list. A few months down the track, something changes in their business, and suddenly they need exactly what you offer.
Which piece of marketing gets the credit for that sale?
Probably none of them, even when it's due.
They worked together.
That’s why I talk so much about your online presence, rather than treating social media, Pinterest, your website, blogs and email as completely separate things.
Social media has a role to play, but it doesn’t have to do everything.
And understanding what that role is makes it much easier to decide what you should actually be posting.
Before you create your next post
Instead of starting with “What should we post today?”, try starting here:
What do I want the right person to get from this?
Maybe you want them to understand something they’ve been getting wrong. Perhaps there’s a useful resource on your website that could solve a problem for them. You might want to remind existing customers about something else you offer, or you simply want to start a conversation and hear what people think.
Once you know that, creating the content gets much easier.
So does measuring it afterwards.
And this is where the difference between posting on social media and marketing through social media becomes pretty important.
Anyone can fill a content calendar.
The useful bit is knowing why those posts are there in the first place, what they’re supposed to achieve, and what you learn from what happens next.
So before deciding that your social media isn’t working, or that the solution is to post more often, have a look at what you’ve been publishing lately.
Can you tell what job each post was supposed to do?
If you can’t, I’d start there.