Social Media makes for an indispensable part of your marketing strategy. Needless to say, you would do everything possible to make your efforts successful and increase your brand visibility on social media. But how do you know if your strategy is relevant and is working as expected? That is where social media metrics play a significant role.
Here are a few proven ways to measure social media success
Check for the effectiveness of your social media activities
To assess this, you must first set your social media goals and determine what you want to achieve out of your activities. Read, share, reply, click, purchase, or engage? The results of your activities will be effective accordingly.
Decide which metrics you want to monitor
Based on your ultimate goal, you will need to measure awareness, engagement, traffic, followers, and fans, or brand’s share of voice. Accordingly, you will only look at the numbers that matter.
For awareness– see volume, reach, exposure, etc.
For engagement– see retweets, comments, shares, replies, and participation in contests/polls/discussions.
For traffic– see URL shares, clicks, conversions, time spent on your site, activity on your site.
For followers– track contributors to your page/s/profiles and their influence on the rest of the audience.
For the share of voice– track your brand’s mention among your competition
Calculate the metrics that you need
You can look at ongoing activities to measure and monitor all social activities over a period (week/month/quarter). Or you can focus on campaign-based activities for specific results.
Once you know what to measure, look for tools to extract the data and analyze them. You can use the inbuilt analytics tools provided by most social media channels or use third-party tools.
Interpret the numbers that you extract
This is the most important part of your analysis and will determine if your social efforts are bringing any results or not. Compare a) number you got against what you expected, and b) your results against your competitors against related products/campaigns.
Numbers do look great on the monthly report but measuring social media activities can do more than that. It helps you learn about what is working for you and what isn’t, and what can you do to improve your strategy and create a robust plan.