Last Updated on June 29, 2024
Social media has become a significant part of any company’s marketing strategy. Social media makes reaching customers and building relationships easy, providing many benefits for your business. However, even social media managed by a remote assistant presents challenges that traditional marketing channels don’t have—namely, how do you know your efforts are paying off? This article will show you how to measure the success of your social media campaigns so you can improve your results in the future.
Define measurable goals
Before you start, defining measurable goals for your campaign is essential. These will help you track the success or otherwise of your campaign. When setting quantifiable goals, consider the following:
- How many goals are there?
- And how long will it take to achieve each goal? Will there be a deadline or time frame for something to happen (e.g., increased sales by 20%)?
- What action do you want people to take (e.g., signing up for an email list)? Is this goal attainable within a reasonable amount of time, given how much effort is needed on their part and yours?
Decide on the right metrics to track
- Decide on the right metrics to track.
- Measure success.
- Understand the various types of metrics and how to measure them.
The first step in measuring social media marketing performance is deciding on the data you want to collect. After that, you should select a platform on which to obtain such. You’ll want to consider both qualitative and quantitative metrics. Qualitative measures include impressions, reach, brand lift, and share of voice. Quantitative measures include likes/followers gained or lost and engagement per post/video/photo (e.g., comments). An excellent way to determine which measurements benefit your business is by seeing what competitors collect. In addition, you can note what other companies similar in size are doing about their campaigns (for example, if Microsoft has 5 million followers on Twitter, then maybe you should have at least half of that number).
Pinpoint your audience
Step 1:
Define your target audience.
- This can be a tricky step when you’re just starting, but knowing who you’re trying to reach will help you evaluate whether or not your campaign is successful.
- If you know that most of your customers are women between the ages of 25 and 40, it would make sense to focus on those demographics in your social media marketing efforts.
Step 2:
You can use social media analytics tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to identify who visits your pages—and how often they return.
Use tools to monitor your campaign’s progress.
Use a social media dashboard to track your campaign’s progress. The dashboard should show you the number of followers, likes, and total reach (how many people saw your posts). This can help you determine whether you should make adjustments.
Use a social media analytics tool to measure how effectively your posts provide value to customers. If they’re not retaining information from your posts, it may be time for a change in strategy. Use a social media scheduling tool to schedule content updates in advance. Updates won’t be lost in the shuffle of all the other content emerging at once on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. This way, people will still see your updates even if they don’t look at their feeds daily or hourly.
Make sure you define measurable goals and select the correct metrics to track
When measuring social media success, you need to ensure that you’re defining measurable goals. You can use the same metrics to measure your progress as with other forms of online marketing.
When choosing a tool for measuring, remember that different types of companies will have different needs and wants from their devices. For example, if you are a small business or an individual freelancer working on your campaigns, free tools such as Google Analytics might be enough for your needs. However, a paid tool might be better suited for tracking these details if your company has multiple accounts across multiple networks and platforms (such as Facebook ads). A paid tool may also provide more advanced features, such as automated reporting and integration with other third-party software tools already used by your team members.
Conclusion
When you’re ready to launch your next social media campaign, define measurable goals and select the right metrics to track. We recommend starting with a few key stats that are easy to measure, like reach or engagement rate (for example, likes on Facebook posts). Then, as you gain confidence in your ability to gauge success through these numbers, you can look into more advanced analytics tools that can help with more profound analysis.
This can include sentiment analysis (that is, determining whether people love what they see), brand lift tracking (which shows how much better-known brands become after using social media), or even Twitter (now called X) threading (in which users click through related tweets on their timeline). Tracking these different factors will help provide insights into a campaign’s success. It is important to track as managing social media channels is not free. You do not want to waste your money.