PracticalDermatology

Any good online marketing strategy should include a cohesive social media campaign. When tracked and tweaked regularly, a social media campaign can deliver excellent marketing dividends. In fact, many small and medium business success stories with social media essentially boil down to sustained tracking to identify what works and what doesn't. The key to success is quickly measuring the impact of your social efforts. With limited time and resources at your disposal for such marketing efforts, it becomes critical to know what to emphasize and what to play down. That can happen only when you effectively keep track of your social media efforts. Here are some strategies on how to track your social media campaign.

1. USE PROVEN WEBSITE ANALYTICS

Probably the single most effective way to assess the return on investment (ROI) for your social media marketing efforts is to track the number of website conversions that originated from your social media networks. The simplest way to do this is to employ Google Analytics, which is the most popular and free website metrics tool for individuals, businesses, and professionals. This tool will allow you to track how many people visit your dermatology website by clicking on the site content links that you posted on your social networks, or share your links with others.

2. ANALYZE SOCIAL CONVERSIONS

Prior to tracking your data via Google Analytics for your social media networks, you can set up customized goals for different types of conversions that you wish to track Conversions or responses can be in various forms, such as a lead, an enquiry, a downloaded form or coupon, a subscription to your e-newsletter, or anything else that requires a specific action. You can go to Traffic Sources to look for social conversion data, and click on “Conversions.” Detailed instructions are available to guide you through setting up your social tracking goals.

3. USE ANALYTICS TO REDIRECT YOUR SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

Consistent tracking of your social media marketing results will enable you to identify the most effective social channels for your purpose. You will also be able to analyze what kind of content fetches the best engagement and response in the form of comments, likes, and shares. Invest maximum efforts in those areas to enhance the social engagement to a greater level. With better engagement, your content will be shared more widely. This could eventually result in more conversions over a period of time.

4. LEVERAGE SOCIAL MEDIA INSIGHTS TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS

It is possible to expand your social media reach and engagement levels by effectively redefining your social strategies and efforts for maximum impact. However, whether social followers convert into actual clients is a difficult assessment, and it will vary from one dermatology practice to another.

There is no one-size-fits-all miracle solution when it comes to converting followers and fans from Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks to real clients. It is a long-term process, and the goal must be to build sustainable relationships with your network. Rather than aiming at quick sales, long-term relationships will produce greater benefits in terms of actual conversions and sales.

5. CHOOSE THE MOST EFFECTIVE MEASUREMENT TOOLS

Google Analytics is a comprehensive social media success measurement tool, and it allows you to do the most at the lowest cost. However, the challenge is that you will be required to do more work on your part to generate useful reports. You will need to gain deeper knowledge of the tool to get the best output from it. You can also consider paid social media analytic tool alternatives such as “Inside Social” or “SproutSocial.”

Inside Social is an all-in-one solution that allows you to track the social efforts of your practice across various social networks all in one place. It will also analyze precisely how your social shares are leading to better engagement, sign-ups, conversions, and more. This tool offers you a free demo, which you can explore before you decide to go for it. SproutSocial is another interesting social analytics tool that can help you estimate cross-platform social media “Return on Investment” for your practice. It even provides competitor analysis and customizable, presentation-ready analytics reports.

6. MONITOR THE MOST SIGNIFICANT METRICS

Perhaps the most valuable social media metric for any business or profession is the total number of followers your social network attracts. Equally important is the sustainability of the followers, which means that your social media network should manage to retain the number of followers it attracts. With billions of people around the world using social media, it has become a numbers game, and size does matter.

However, local relevance of your network membership is more important from the point of view of a dermatology practice. Conversions will usually happen only from the targeted, local audience in your case. If you are using paid advertising on social media, it will become important to track the cost per lead or cost per sale generated. The increase in sales must be enough to justify the advertising costs on social media.

7. CONSIDER OUTSOURCING

Social media result monitoring and measuring is an ongoing task, and you should ideally be tracking the results on a weekly basis. In any case, social media marketing and engagement comes before the tracking of results. This can be more demanding on your time if you really want to see substantial results. If your in-house team is overworked and cannot justify these efforts due to lack of time, you may consider outsourcing the social media marketing and monitoring activities to an experienced and reliable professional company.

Social media result monitoring and measuring is an ongoing task, and you should ideally be tracking the results on a weekly basis. In any case, social media marketing and engagement comes before the tracking of results. This can be more demanding on your time if you really want to see substantial results. If your in-house team is overworked and cannot justify these efforts due to lack of time, you may consider outsourcing the social media marketing and monitoring activities to an experienced and reliable professional company.

Visit DermTube.com and search “Ekwa” for video demonstrations of key issues in social media marketing and SEO.

Naren Arulrajah is President and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete Internet marketing company which focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education and the online reputations of dermatologists. With a team of 130+ full time marketers, Ekwa.com helps one doctor in an area dominate their market and grow their business significantly year after year. If you have questions about marketing your practice online, call Naren direct at 877-249-9666.