Hardware Retailing The Industry's Source for Insights and Information
Nearly nine in 10 independent home improvement businesses use social media, but only about 50 percent of them track their sites’ performance, according to a recent study from the North American Retail Hardware Association (NRHA).
That means many retailers have no way to gauge their social media success, overall engagement and what types of content are working best.
Only 1.5 percent of those retailers rate their social media presence as excellent, acknowledging they have clear room for improvement, as Hardware Retailing highlights in the March issue of the magazine.
One way to improve overall performance is by tracking social media engagement and activity over time and using tools, such as Hootsuite, Facebook analytics or TweetDeck, to get a better idea of how to maximize the use of the different sites.
Applied to Retail: If you do not have one already, create a social media strategy and determine what platforms your business will use and what audience each platform is targeting. Then, make goals for each platform, such as how much you want to grow the number of followers you have or increase engagement by a certain percentage. If you want your different social media sites to drive traffic to your store’s website, make that a goal.
When developing your goals, make sure they are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. For example, a goal could be to increase Facebook followers by 15 percent in a six-month time frame.
Once you have goals in place, begin tracking site analytics on a monthly basis or more often so you can see your progress and analyze what is or is not working on each platform.
To get started, download Hardware Retailing’s free social media toolkit, which includes an analytics template, a content calendar template, recommended best practices and more.
