Businesses that use social media for marketing should be measuring its effectiveness. Don't create metrics if they don't have a purpose. Measuring your social activities will help you learn what is successful and what is not.
The effectiveness of social media is generally gauged by two measures: metrics that evaluate ongoing performance and those geared toward more discrete campaigns. Analytics, which track activity over time, will let you see what's being said about your brand and company over time.
A campaign-focused metric, such as the number of clicks or the cost per click, can help you understand the impact of a targeted marketing initiative. You need to include both ongoing performance and campaign-specific measurements.
If you promote yourself on Instagram for example, these measurements will help you track the most important result of your work - your Instagram growth. It's a bad idea to aim for quick results when it comes to growing your profile, relying on AI-powered growth tools such as Social Meep, when you could focus on organic growth and acquire long-lasting customers.
To get started tracking your own social media campaigns, follow these five steps:
Set your objectives
Before you start quantifying your social media engagement, stop and think about your objectives for your brand's presence on those platforms. How do you want to measure your success? What are the goals you hope to achieve through these channels? What do these goals have in common?
Because social media can be used to inform the public, answer customer questions, and engage with customers, the site is a vital part of a marketing strategy. This means that you should consider what your audience wants to do with your content. If they want to read or share, use long-form content. If they want to reply or click, use short-form content.
Establish metrics to track your progress toward your objectives
Specify goals in terms of behaviors and results that can be measured. What constitutes an appropriate and meaningful measure of success for a piece of content? Here are some examples:
- If you want to increase traffic to your website, track URL shares, clicks, and conversions. What social media sites are they using to find your external site, and what do they do once they're there?
- If you want to assess engagement, look for indicators such as reactions, comments, responses, and participation. How many individuals are involved, how frequently are they involved?
- Tracking the volume of your brand's voice relative to that of its competitors is a good way to measure the share of voice. What portion of the overall conversation is about you?
Assess your achievement
Social media channels can provide analytics that can help you measure your reach and effectiveness. You might measure using third-party tools, or you can create your own measuring tools by using your own APIs.
If you’re new to using social media tools, ask someone else or do additional research. You can set up tracking before you start your campaign. But if you want to analyze the success of your campaign, do it while the campaign is still running. Access the data later by saving it now.
Observe and Review
Measure the results of your campaign to see how it compares both in total and against those of other similar endeavors and then share these with stakeholders for further analysis. Two questions to ask are: Are our figures as expected? How do they compare to those of similar companies or products?
Consider creating a schedule for regular reporting during this time. If you are busy and have a weekly deadline, it may work best for you to report on a weekly basis. But if you don’t have deadlines and can get the information together in a more relaxed way, it is probably best for you to report on a monthly or quarterly basis.
Adjust as needed and repeat
Measuring the success of your initial campaign will help you determine where to go with future campaigns. The early figures from your first measurement will lay a foundation for future measurement.
Make sure you're using data to evaluate your content. Doing so will help you determine how well your social media campaigns are working and give you valuable information on how to improve if needed.
Final Words
When using social media platforms for a particular cause or project, it’s important to understand if the content being posted is having the desired impact on our audience. It helps to adopt a systematic approach to measuring progress.
Check all the aspects of your business so you can start working towards improvement. You need to re-evaluate your goals and make sure they match up with your current metrics.