Using Social Media to Impact Your Franchise Business

Using Social Media to Impact Your Franchise Business

Creating your social media presence is an integral part of business success planning.  There is no getting away from it, half the planet uses social media, and a significant number of those users are looking to buy.  How do you make sure that it does not become a burden for your business but an asset?  Let’s look at 3 crucial ways for social media to impact your business.

Measuring Results

One of the more frustrating things about social media is how do you measure the results of all your efforts?  Choosing your channels according to your business/sector/profile is a given, a craft business will use Pinterest, a fitness business like RISE Fitness will concentrate heavily on Instagram. Keeping the effort focused on 2 or 3 channels will also help.

But how do you know what is pushing sales?  Is it number of followers?  Is it re-tweets or sharing?

So it’s important to have a social media Return on Investment (ROI) to understand if likes and shares are growing your business and not just your follower count.

Choosing Social Media KPI’s

The number of social media Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are legion!  You could have as many as you like but again, chose just a few metrics to concentrate on.  Our advice is to divide these KPI’s into engagement with your content and engagement off-platform.

Content Engagement

Our recommendations on keeping tabs on engagement are:

Followers – keep a simple spreadsheet on the number of followers of course but also the GROWTH in followers. Is it rising month by month? If not then you will have to change your content strategy

Likes, Shares & Comments – this is social media 101, the more likes you have the longer the algorithms will push you to the top of the feed.  Shares and re-tweets matter because this expands your network to people who likely have not been exposed to your business.  Comments are cream on top as anyone who is moved to comment could become a customer and you get a chance to interact with them.

Impressions – this gives you an indication of how widely exposed your product or brand is in people’s feeds.  The more you have the better chance you have of growing customers.

The actual numbers here are not as important as the growth of the numbers.  After all, everybody starts somewhere and from zero the only way is up and up and up…However, you want this activity from your followers on social media to impact on our business so we need to look at what they are doing outside the social media piece.

Engagement Off Platform

The aim of all that effort on social media is to get people to buy our product or fitness membership by going to your web site or landing page.

Use these 3 measures:

Total Sales – use Google analytics to measure where the people who land on your web site are coming from.  Are social media referrals buying on your site or booking a trial?

Bounce Rate – this measures how many customers leave your site after viewing just one page. You want this number low as possible and anything under 40% is pretty good.  If it’s high then something is not working; the web site functionality, the product is not right or you are attracting the wrong user.

Conversion Rate – this measures how many people book/buy after landing on your page.  The average landing page converts at 5% so try and get at least to that number.

A Simple Score

If you don’t love the idea of filling in a spreadsheet and analysing it then there is a simple score you could use.  Add up all the money you have spent on social media, including labour hours, then add up the sales that have some from social media users and divide investment into sales.  Times by 100 and you have a score.

The key thing is to understand the data before you pour effort into something that is not working.  When it works it will form a key part of your business planning success. 

#risefitness #fitnessfranchise #beyourownboss

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