How to keep score for your social media campaign
If you use social media for your business, you should be measuring your efforts on a regular basis. Measuring allows you to track your success and helps uncover mistakes. It also identifies ways to improve your campaign performance. You probably ask “How do I know that our social media marketing campaign is working for our business? What is the best way to measure success of our social media campaign?”. The answer varies from business to business but the key steps are the same. Here is what you need to do to measure the success of your social media marketing efforts.
Determine your social media campaign goals
Before you start tracking metrics to measure your social media success, you must figure out what exactly you need to measure. You must know what you are trying to achieve with your social media campaign. Then identify the metrics that will tell you how much you have been able to achieve. Each social media campaign has different goals. These may include:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Driving traffic to the website
- Generating new leads
- Growing revenue
- Boosting brand engagement
- Building a community
- Social media customer service
- Increasing PR and social mentions
- More
Once you determine your campaign goals you can use the relevant metrics to measure your success.
Identify the metrics to measure the campaign goals
Based on your campaign goals, identify the metrics you want to track. For example, if your goal is to boost customer engagement, you should track metrics such as likes, comments and shares per post. Basically, identify metrics that tell you how many people are interacting with your posts. Other metrics to track may include mentions and replies. It will tell you the number of people interacting with your posts. If your objective is lead generation, some useful metrics could be email addresses collected through social media, clicks on lead generation posts, event/contest participation and more. Similarly, potential metrics to track to measure brand awareness could include number of followers, mentions, shares, retweets, and reach of social media posts.
Capture the metrics
Once you have identified the metrics you need to track, you need to identify the right tools that will help you capture the relevant metrics. Most social media platforms provide pretty good analytics and you can use them to monitor and track most of the basic metrics. However, for more advanced analytics, you may want to invest in a third-party tool such as Hootsuite, Social Media Tracker, Google Analytics, Keyhole etc. You must have your social media tracking tool ready before you launch your campaign so that you can monitor and track the progress from the very beginning.
Monitor the metrics
It is important to monitor and report the metrics at regular intervals. Apart from tracking the absolute numbers, you must also measure the weekly, monthly and yearly progress. Once you have the numbers at hand, check how the numbers compare with your expectations and with your competitors. This will give you a fair idea of how well your social media campaign is working for you. It will also reveal the problem areas and you will get a chance to improve upon them. For example, if you are not getting enough shares on your Facebook pages, you might want to re-work your content strategy to ensure that it is more share-worthy.
Designing, implementing and measuring a social media can be tough. If you are interested in starting a social media marketing campaign for your business and would like help gauging opportunities and successes and opportunities, get in touch with our team now.