The Insatiable Solopreneur™

Succeeding and Surviving as a Solopreneur

Archive for the tag “Measuring social media”

05 Jun 2012
2 Comments

The Essentials Every Solopreneur Needs to Track about Leads, Prospects and Clients

Solopreneurs who provide professional services know that “who they know” goes a long way in bringing in new business.Where do your clients come from? There’s no sitting around and waiting for new clients to find us; we have to make connections. And that can be done in many different ways.

But as important as making connections is, so is keeping tabs on how those connections happened and where they’ve led. Without having a handle on where leads, prospects and clients are coming from and the outcome of those inquiries, there’s no way to really know which of your marketing tactics are working the best for you.

Tracking those things doesn’t require any sort of elaborate database. A simple Excel spreadsheet will do the trick provided that you record the information that matters – and that you keep up with it!

The essentials:

  • Name of the lead/prospect/customer (Company and contact name)
  • Email address
  • Physical address
  • Phone number
  • Website and Social Media links
  • Types of services inquired about
  • How did they find you? / How did you connect with them? (e.g. Chamber mixers, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, web search, referral from a client, direct mail campaign…)
  • Date when you first connected
  • Potential assessment (e.g. general interest/no specific opportunity, specific project opportunity, potential for recurring work, etc.)
  • If applicable, date when they became your client

Easy, right? It will take you 5 minutes tops to capture this basic information when someone contacts you about your services and even less to update it when a prospect converts to a paying customer. If you devote that small bit of time to the cause, you’ll have at your fingertips a simple way to quickly see where the majority of your leads – and clients – are coming from. And with that, you can begin to focus your marketing and sales time, energy and dollars on the strategies and tactics that have shown the most promise and results.

Your turn! How do you keep track of where your leads, prospects and clients are coming from? What marketing tactics are working best for you?


Dialing 8 Project

Consider joining the Dialing 8 Project! A forum for learning, sharing & getting the most out of your social media efforts for your small business.

Free images from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Posted in Marketing, Networking and tagged , , , , , , , , ,
31 Jan 2012
2 Comments

Over-Analyzing Your Social Media Game Plan: Part 2 of 2 – Obsessing About How Well You’re Doing It

I would love to connect with you! Join me on Facebook  | Twitter | LinkedIn | Google+

______

My last post hit on how to be flexible in your social media strategy. Being rigid and too “canned” can make your presenceMeasuring stale. Another trap solopreneurs fall into is over-analyzing how well they’re doing in their social media efforts.

 

How Well You’re Doing It

If you’re a small business owner (and especially if you’re a solopreneur), you don’t need any fancy software or analytical tools to get an overall feel for how well your social media efforts are going. You see the quantity and quality of interactions, you see the types of posts that draw the most comments and are shared the most, and you see how many connections are your old college buddies vs. how many are existing or prospective clients.

In his post, Social Metrics: Do We Need Them?, Craig Hall gives some sensible advice. He recommends that we concentrate on communicating and building out our social media networks rather than worry too much about gauging the impact. With a bunch of software developers feverishly working on the latter to bring new tools our way, your time is better spent engaging with your audience so you’ve got something notable to measure.

But if you want to go beyond your gut for evaluating your efforts, there are some easily accessible – and FREE – analytics built right into tools that you may already be using. Because Facebook and Twitter reign as the most-used social media by solopreneurs and small business owners, I’ve focused on them:

Facebook Insights – At a glance, you’ll see how many people or pages Like your page, how many people and pages your posts reached during the week, how many people and pages interacted with your page, and the virality of your individual posts.

Hootsuite – The social media scheduling tool has Quick Analytics that provide you with free Summary Stats which include information about how many people clicked on your posts’ links, the countries where those people are located, and which posts were most popular. You can also upgrade your account to get customize reports with more detailed information.

BufferApp – Another scheduling tool, BufferApp, provides Analytics that show you the potential reach of your tweets, the number of clicks your tweets’ links received, and the quantity of retweets, favorites and mentions your posts got.

Google Analytics – If you’ve got Google Analytics set up on your website, you can check your stats to see how many visits from your website came from your social media channels. So, if your social media tactics involve calls to action to get people to visit your website, here’s where  you can see if you’re succeeding.

WordPress – I can’t speak for other blog platforms, but WordPress.com has Site Stats that allow you to see how much traffic your blog got on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. It also gives you the number of all-time views, today’s views, and views on your busiest day. Another cool feature is that it lets you see which of your posts were most popular.

So if you’re not comfortable making your own assessment of your social media savvy, there are some quick and easy ways to see if what you’re doing is effective. Just keep in mind that it takes time to build up your social media clout.  When using any tool, look more for steady improvement (in followers, fans, page views, clicks, etc.) over time rather than a miraculous overnight success.

And make sure you’re concentrating the vast majority of your time and effort into interacting on your social media networks rather than trying to measure and validate every last post!

How do you measure and monitor your social media efforts? What’s your biggest challenge?

Related Reads:

Benchmarking Your Social Performance by Jason Falls via Social Media Explorer

Social Media Analytics: The Small Business Guide to Metrics and Tools via Social Success


Dialing 8 Project

Consider joining the Dialing 8 Project! A forum for learning, sharing & getting the most out of your social media efforts for your small business.

Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Posted in Social Media, Uncategorized and tagged ,

Post Navigation

%d bloggers like this: