Last Updated on September 13, 2023
Social media has become a major part of any company’s marketing strategy. Social media makes it easy to reach customers and build relationships with them, which can provide many benefits for your business. However, social media even managed by a remote assistant also presents challenges that traditional marketing channels don’t have—namely, how do you know whether 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, going forward.
Define measurable goals
Before you start, it’s important to define measurable goals for your campaign. These will help you track the success or otherwise of your campaign. When setting measurable goals, consider:
- How many goals are there?
- And how long will it take to achieve each goal? Will, there be a deadline or time frame in which something has 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 sort of data you want to collect. Thereafter 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, as well as engagement per post/video/photo (e.g., comments). A good way of determining which measurements are most useful for your business is by seeing what competitors are already collecting. In addition, you can note what other companies similar in size are doing with regard to their own 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 out, 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 come back.
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 and likes, as well as the 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 effective your posts are at providing 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 every day or on an hourly basis.
Make sure you define measurable goals and select the correct metrics to track
When it comes to measuring social media success, you need to make sure 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, keep in mind that different types of companies will have different needs and wants from their tools. For example, if you are a small business or an individual freelancer working on your own campaigns, free tools such as Google Analytics might be enough for what you need. However, if your company has multiple accounts across multiple networks and platforms (such as Facebook ads), a paid tool might be better suited for tracking these details. A paid tool may also provide more advanced features such as automated reporting and integration with other third-party software tools already being used by your team members.
Conclusion
When you’re ready to launch your next social media campaign, make sure you 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 deeper 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 threading (in which users click through related tweets on their timeline). Tracking all of these different factors will help provide insights into how successful a campaign has been.
