Every business has a Facebook page, Twitter account, etc. How important are those likes and followers? Are email open rates really a good gauge of customer engagement with your brand? Marketing 101 might tell you that these are easy metrics to analyze, that show how well your marketing campaigns are working… but are they really?

The Twitter Follower Flaw

Your company’s Twitter follower number might seem like a great way to gauge your brand recognition, but consider your own personal Twitter account. How many companies do you follow? How many of them do you actually notice, or have interest in their brand? Your answer is most likely very few, compared to how many you follow. The same can be said for your company’s Twitter followers. Just because you have followers doesn’t mean they are all absorbing your content.

So what is a better Twitter marketing metric? Compare your competitor’s followers to yours. People that follow your competition that aren’t following you are your missed opportunities. Take time to research what kinds of content these Twitter users are consuming, and focus your efforts on your new target audience.

Twitter Action Plan: Use a service like FollowerWonk to delve deep into your Twitter analytics, or Cadmus to see your followers’ most shared links.

The Facebook Fallacy

Everyone and their grandma has a Facebook page. Facebook just isn’t the hotbed of the social media marketing scene anymore. More and more Millenials aren’t even using their Facebook pages on a daily or even weekly basis anymore. Like Twitter followers, just because you have a certain amount of “likes,” on Facebook, doesn’t mean it’s going to ever equate to brand recognition or actual sales growth.

Facebook Action Plan: Use Facebook for strengthening your SEO. Even Google has confirmed that the links on Facebook pages- whether personal or on a Fan Page will help increase a website’s SEO.

The Erroneous Email Open Rates

Email open rates are great for checking the strength of your email’s subject and timing, but not a whole lot else. One of the main problems with open rates is that most email clients require images to open to count as an “open,” and many people have images turned off.

The Click-Through Rate is a much better marketing metric that actually shows the efficiency of an email. How many people read the email, and actually clicked on a link to visit your corresponding website page? This is a much better indication of customer engagement and lead-generation.

Email action plan: Make sure there are appropriate and intriguing links to your website in your emails. Let the reader have a bit of a “to do” for further reading, or to download a product spec sheet.

The Page View Paradox

You spend hours planning and creating content that is important to your customer base. Is it having the impact that you are looking for? Page views are a great start in finding out if people are responding to what you’re putting out there, but it really doesn’t tell the whole story. Page views don’t tell you if they’ve spent time reading the article, whether they’ve shared it with anyone, or if they want more information and checked out other parts of your website. The better metric to keep an eye out for is your bounce rate. A bounce rate is the percentage of readers who don’t click through to more of your website, or read another article or blog post. A drop in bounce rate shows that your content is speaking to your readers in a way that is prompting them to engage your brand.

Another great way to tell if your blogs are hitting home runs is social shares. The key is to combine sales strategy with content that is engaging enough that your target audience takes the time to share it.

Blog Action Plan: Create content that gives the reader homework. “Download the brochure here” or “Check out our new products page for more info”.  These kinds of calls-to-action can drive more views to your website, and your brand spends more time in front of your customers.

Is this all a bit overwhelming? Maybe it’s time you considered outsourcing your marketing. Read more about that HERE.