The world of social media can be a bit daunting. On one hand, you may feel very conversant with it in your personal life as you stay in touch with friends and family, keep up on current events, follow celebrities and leaders, and learn more about your favorite products and services. On the other hand, you may have accounts set up for your insurance agency but have no real clue how they can serve your business or how to tell if your efforts are working.
Adding to the confusion is the fact that social media is ever-changing, with new tools and options added regularly to help you keep track of followers, clicks, likes and more. It could easily be a full-time job figuring all of this out—and it is for some—but most insurance agents have limited time and resources, which is why it’s essential to pinpoint which metrics matter for you!
Before you try to determine which social media metrics you should track, however, it’s very helpful to take a step back and figure out your social media goals, which could be things like:
- Driving traffic to your website
- Increasing awareness about your insurance agency
- Generating new insurance leads
- Creating positive mentions for public relations purposes
- Generating referrals
- Growing your audience, building a more engaged audience, cross-selling new insurance products, etc.
Having too many goals is where the work can easily become overwhelming. Narrowing it to two or three will help give you direction on what to post and on which social media metrics matter to you.
For example, if you’ve started offering a new insurance product and want to drive people to your website to learn more about it, you can track how many of your click-throughs came from social media accounts as a whole. Then you can parse that data further and look at which platform (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) garnered the most interest. This may tell you where to focus similar efforts in the future.
For a different goal like creating positive PR, you might instead track engagement, which tells you how many people are interacting with your posts. The most obvious measure of engagement is the number of likes or comments you receive, but there’s more to it than that. Did anyone share your post? How many people saw it and liked it after that happened? Was it amplified by and influencer who shared it with their followers?
In other words, it’s all well and good to post a photo of a cute puppy that your existing followers liked, but were they engaged enough to share that post with others and thereby spread a positive impression of your agency? And if they did share your post, who did they share it with? Was it with an audience that you are trying to reach? It probably can’t hurt if your post goes viral with a bunch of teenagers who happen to love puppies, but are those consumers likely to purchase insurance from you?
Each social media platform offers tools to analyze your posts in different ways. You can track data ranging from the number of impressions you’re making (the number of times you post shows up in someone’s feed) to how quickly your staff is responding to messages left on your account.
Start poking around the Insights tab on Facebook or the Twitter Analytics page and see what you find. It can be illuminating to track trends and notice what’s working and what isn’t. Be sure to keep your goals clearly in mind as you do so; this will help you focus only on the data that matters to you and make it easier to ignore the rest.
In addition to the measurement tools that come with each social media platform, there are also companies that specialize in pulling out the information and sharing it with you in an easy-to-follow format. This is a great option if the idea of identifying relevant tidbits of data makes you want to pull out your hair. Do a search for “social media analytics tools” and you’ll find some good options.
One of our social media goals at Hometown Quotes is to provide useful information to insurance agents. If your found this article helpful, we hope you’ll get connected with us on social! Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn so our new blogs show up in your feed. And please give us a call at XXX.XXX.XXXX if you want to learn more about our fresh, pre-qualified leads for insurance professionals.
0 Comments