Even if your social media campaign is made up of the most creative, compelling content, it serves no good unless it is backed by channel expertise and liaised with your overall business goals.
It is important to track the success of your social media campaigns to reach a point of analysis. But, it can be a complicated process even with the best tools at your disposal. So, a better way to do this is by breaking down the elements of what works for you.
This includes:
- Knowing the effectiveness of your social media practices
- Knowing what metrics to keep an eye on
- Knowing how to measure those metrics
- Knowing how to gain insights from the numbers you get
With that in mind, check out the essential steps for tracking and measuring your social media marketing campaigns' success.
Step 1: Define Your Social Goals
Determining the goals of your social campaign is the essential step to get you started. If you don’t have a clear direction, you won’t be able to see which strategy works and which might need an adjustment.
So, before you start counting the likes, shares, comments, and retweets, ask yourself what you want to achieve with your social media marketing.
Do you want to raise brand awareness and drive more customers to your door? Are you looking to boost engagement and generate qualified leads? Is your ultimate social goal building meaningful, long-term relationships with customers?
Make a list of clear goals and see what social channels can help you achieve them. Make sure you set SMART goals – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.
Once you know your goals, it’s time to define your objectives. Although often used interchangeably, goals and objectives aren’t the same things.
Objectives are the specific, measurable part of your campaign. They include the actions you’re going to take to reach your goals, which are the campaign’s outcome.
For instance, if your goal is to forge stronger relationships with customers, one objective for achieving it could be to respond to 80% of your Tweets in two hours. It’s specific, and something you can easily measure.
Step 2: Match Your Goals to KPIs
To measure your goals, you need to know which metrics or KPIs (key performance indicators) to track. You can’t randomly track some metrics without knowing how they affect your goals and objectives. Perhaps they don’t carry any significance to what you’re trying to achieve.
For instance, if one of your goals is boosting engagement, you can’t measure that engagement by looking at your reach. Even if your reach is huge, that doesn’t necessarily indicate that all or majority of your followers are engaged.
Here are some examples of the most critical KPIs for the most common social goals:
- Increasing brand awareness: reach, number of followers, likes, shares, retweets, link clicks per social media post
- Boosting engagement: number and especially the frequency of shares, retweets, comments, mentions, replies, and participants on your social page and in conversations
- Driving more website traffic: number of link shares and link clicks leading to your website, and number of conversions coming from social media
- Generating more leads: number of clicks on links and posts for lead generation, number of leads you’ve generated through social channels, number of social conversions
- Improving social customer service: number of support messages and comments, average response time, FCR (first contact resolution) rate, number of resolved and unresolved questions, customer satisfaction
Step 3: Measure Your KPIs
Once you know which KPIs you’re going to measure to see how your social media strategies will pan out, you need proper tools for actually measuring them.
Some social channels, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, offer detailed analytics for business profiles. However, even if you can access such analytics, you should utilize some third-party tools.
They’ll provide you with in-depth reports and stats that will give you a clear insight into all your metrics. What’s more, they usually provide real-time reports, which is what you need to make better, timely decisions for accomplishing your goals.
Some of the best tools you can use to measure your lead-generation KPIs are quiz generator tools. Of course, they’ll work if you’re going to create quizzes to generate leads.
And you really should, because people love taking fun quizzes in their spare time. Sharing them on social channels will help you spread the word about your business, attract qualified leads, and generate conversions.
If you decide to create a quiz using a reliable quiz builder, you’ll be able to get excellent real-time reports and analytics on participation, engagement, conversions, and more.
Step 4: Monitor & Report
It’s essential to be patient once you start measuring. The numbers you generate over a few days won’t be enough to draw meaningful conclusions.
Keep measuring for at least a week or two to see whether you’re going in the right direction and if your social activities are bearing fruit.
After you’ve gathered enough data to see the results of your campaign, send the reports to your key stakeholders. Depending on your goals and business schedule, you can send weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports.
Your initial reports will help you set the benchmarks for all your next measurements. Be sure to include them in the reports, along with some graphs and other data visualization methods for social media. That way, you’ll be able to see how effective your strategies are clearly.
Most importantly, don’t stop measuring, monitoring, and reporting. As long as you use social media to market your business and connect with customers, track every activity.
If you want to grow, you can’t stop tracking your KPIs after one successful campaign. Trends and consumer behavior will keep changing, so you’ll need to keep adjusting.
Take Away
Being able to measure social media post success is crucial to any social media strategy. Without knowing your KPIs, you’re just throwing content against the wall to see what sticks.
So, define your social media goals, find the right metrics to match them, and use that data to make your content the best it can be.
