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Leveraging Social Media for Small Business Growth

In today’s digital world, social media isn’t just a place to share memes and vacation pics. For small businesses, it’s a powerful tool for growth, but only if you’re keeping a close eye on the data. Social media analytics are like your business’s health report – they tell you what’s working, what’s not, and where you should be focusing your efforts.

If you can’t measure it, how can you make it better? Well, there are some important steps for setting up, measuring, and keeping a pulse on key metrics to best leverage social media for the continued growth of your small business online.

The importance of Social Media Analytics

Leveraging various social media tools such as LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager and Meta’s Audience Insights, you gain a deeper understanding of who your current customer base is (or who you are trying to reach). Along with demographics, interests, and when they are most active, this knowledge can help tailor your overall social media strategy for maximum impact.

Measuring success is also necessary as a means of improvement. Analytics provides concrete data on post reach, engagement, and website clicks, which allows you to track progress toward your overall goals. It also gives you the ability to refine your strategy over time.

Sidenote: Don’t forget to set up website analytics so you can see which social channels are giving you the highest quality traffic. Remember, it’s not about doing EVERY social media channel, it’s about doing the channels that produce value for your business well.

Key social media metrics to monitor

Of course, this list can change based on overall business objectives but the basic metrics to track include:

  • Impressions
  • Reach
  • Engagement rate
  • Click-through rate (CTR)
  • Overall audience growth (over a period of time)
  • Sentiment analysis (usually done through a third-party tool)

There are many tools on the market that can help consolidate this information from all channels. Popular tools include Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social. Researching and finding the one that works best for your business should be something you invest a little bit of time on as exchanging a tool for another may mean loss in data and/or disruption in publishing.

Professional’s note: I’ve heard from more than one social media professional that posting and scheduling natively on each platform gets higher engagement. I’ve not proven this but I believe it to be true since each social network has its own best interest in mind.

One thing you want to make sure of is to look at trends over time rather than getting too granular with your investigating. For example, in the below chart, if I considered only the last month, I’d see a huge spike in engagement rate and I may derive insights that aren’t completely true. However, I want to look at a rolling range of dates such as the last quarter or even the last 12 months to see what content is contributing to my key performance indicators (KPIs) and why those posts got as many views as they did.

Actionable Insights for small businesses

Choose your tools wisely, set goals, and don’t forget to remain consistent with your content and social media marketing strategy. A brand guideline and tone of voice document can help if you’re working with a team or want to outsource your social media marketing to an agency or freelancer. In conclusion,

  • Choose your tools
  • Set SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound)
  • Experiment and refine
  • Don’t forget your brand voice

By monitoring your social media analytics, identifying key metrics, and understanding trends over time, you’ll be well on your way to turning your social channels into a powerful engine for small business growth.

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