[Find all posts in the Mind the Social Media Gap series here.]
Most churches I know that do not mind the social media gap may be great at posting content, but they do not know what works. In essence what they are doing is throwing content at a wall and hoping it sticks all the time. Honestly, you could do this and grow a little, but you are by no means being effective with what you are doing.
Below are some ideas, but honestly you need to check these measurements based on the goals that you created in the first step that identified why you even wanted to use social media. Likes are fine and you can track them, but as a social media manager, you need to be true to the passion and purpose that put you onto this ministry account.
- Where Are You Going To Get The Stats From?
Many people have random opinions about this. Some think that all you need is an application like Facebook’s analytics that are built in to see if your social media account is successful. Unfortunately, having only one analytic when you are running multiple social network accounts makes you very limited. Along with that, if you have a social media strategy that is very intentional to get people to your website to sign up for events or read your church’s blog, then you need to incorporate Google Analytics and see how many people are coming to your website because of tweets, status updates, or YouTube videos. My recommendation is SumAll as it is free, the most versatile app online (which is why making it free is such a surprise), and gives you great web and social media stats side-by-side. - Who Gets The Reports?
You need to push for accountability within your team. My personal recommendation is that whoever works with you helps you setup a year long goal that gets reviewed every quarter and adjustments made if needed. A year seems too long and with social networks changing so fast, the landscape will shift too much. A month’s time frame is too much for management. - How Do You Know If You Need To Change Things?
We will fully look at this in the last step, but it needs to be on our radar with measuring our social media usage. Not every social media post is going to be gold, nor do great posts go big for specific reasons. But you will come to a point were change needs to happen and I’d had for it to be too late where you have to call this project a failure.
[…] Measuring Success Who gets the reports and who makes the call to change your strategy if it is not working? How do you know if your falling short? Have an analytics report set up for leadership that gets them the right numbers as well as know where you are getting the statistics for all of the networks you are active on. […]