Being present on social media has become a must-do to get the word out about your products and services. However, a strong presence on social media isn’t built only through posting great content and garnering more likes. It entails measuring the effectiveness of your presence and continuously refining your online strategy. Manish Grover, CEO & founder of ShaadiMagic.com, an online wedding planning marketplace, shares his measurement strategy.

Count the basics

We track our page views, positive comments, negative comments, resolution of negative comments, new visitors and repeat visitors. To build traffic, we regularly post relevant content. We post all sorts of weddings-related content—across categories like makeup, honeymoon, fitness, decoration, fashion, etc. But we keep tabs on what kind of content elicits the best response, and try to cater more to such interest.

Measure the effectiveness of your chosen medium

Our major channel used to be Facebook, now we focus on Instagram and Pinterest though we are also present on Twitter and G+. We started to lose interest in Facebook when it introduced a policy limiting the organic reach of posts to a Facebook page, unless the page owner paid up. Essentially, earlier a post on a page used to reach all of its subscribers. At most, now a post is seen by 1 percent to 3 percent of the subscribers.

Now and then, businesses must evaluate different mediums in terms of user engagement versus effort involved, and take a call on what channel to focus more on.

Evaluate the quality and quantity of leads you generate

It isn’t enough to rely on posting great content to attract people to your page. A proactive approach helps drive traffic to your site. We use hashtags in mediums like Twitter and Instagram to get to know who is talking about various aspects of weddings, and engage with such people. For instance, if someone is looking for a wedding photographer, we suggest names from our listings. Twitter’s advance search function is very helpful in this respect. Then, we evaluate the quality of the leads generated. Are they converting into more visits to our site? Are they helping us to find more service providers to list, which is very important for us because we generate income only through paid listings? To continue with the above example, if we have posted links to photographers on our site, has that helped attract more photographers to get listed on ShaadiMagic.com?

Evaluate the outcomes of your paid presence

Platforms like Twitter and Facebook have huge numbers of subscribers across India. So it makes sense to create a marketing budget to target potential customers. However, to stretch your limited budget, define your target market very well in terms of age, gender, location, occupation, etc. Use the platform’s in-built analytics to measure the outcomes of advertising.