How to Measure the Success of Your Social Media Marketing Efforts

Some marketers work so hard to craft a good social media marketing plan but ignore the important aspect of measuring their social media marketing efforts. 

Measuring your SMM efforts enables you to know the strategies for social media marketing that are working and the ones that are not.

Social media marketing statistics can also help you come up with ways of improving your social media marketing plan. For instance, if you notice that your social media marketing plan isn’t bringing you the results you intended, you can use past SMM metrics to identify past campaigns that worked. With this information, you come up with an improved or new social media marketing checklist that contains ideas that worked in the past.

Moreover, measuring your social media campaigns helps you come up with effective metrics for each social media platform. For instance, measuring the success of a TikTok campaign may require different KPIs from those used in a Twitter campaign.

Types of Social Media Measurement

According to experts, there are two social media marketing types of measurement.

Ongoing analytics

This is a social media measurement that helps you monitor your social media efforts over time. This type of social media measurement is important as it helps you know how your brand is doing and what people are saying about it. Once you set up your ongoing analytics, you leave it to run, and you’ll only need to keep checking on it from time to time.

Campaign-focused metrics

This measurement involves tracking the efforts of a particular social media campaign, meaning it has a beginning and an end. This type of metric is often used to determine the impact of certain marketing campaigns.

Notably, when crafting your social media measurement program, you should include both ongoing and campaign-focused measurements.

How to Measure the Success of Your SMM Efforts

Now that you understand the importance of measuring your social media marketing efforts, let’s look at how this is done.

To get your SMM efforts measurement right, here are five simple steps you should follow.

Define Your Goals

The first step when it comes to measuring your SMM efforts is coming up with your campaign goals. Without goals, you can’t know what social media success looks like.

Some questions that can help you craft SMART social media marketing goals include: What do you want to achieve with your social media marketing efforts?  What do you want your audience to do with your content? Which social media platforms will you use?

Notably, social media can help you achieve a variety of goals, including:

• Brand awareness
• A high engagement rate
• To pass on information
• Generating leads
• Improve your social media presence

You may also be expecting your audience to like, read, share, sign up for a newsletter, engage, click, or purchase your products through social media.

Have a consensus with your marketing team and come up with clear SMM goals that align with your business goals. Ensure you write them down and let everyone in your team work towards them.

Create Metrics to Measure Your Goals

Social media metrics give you the data you need to determine if your marketing campaigns are effective.  You can get your social media data from native analytics or with the help of third-party social analytics tools. Some of the social media KPIs you can use to measure your goals include:

• Likes
• Shares
• Follow growth
• Comments
• Growth in follow-count after the campaign
• Cost per click
• Social media impressions
• Link clicks
• Click-throughs
• Conversion rate
• Post reach
• Exposure
• Amplification

For instance, metrics such as reach, amplification, and exposure can help measure awareness, while comments and retweets can help measure engagement.

On the other hand, if you want to track your follower count, try checking the contributors to your posts and their influence, while an increase in traffic to your website can be determined with the help of URL shares, conversion rates, and clicks.

Analyze and Compare

The third step in the measurement of your SMM efforts is analysis and benchmarking. This step helps you determine if your campaigns are working and how you compare to the competition.

A social media analytics tool can help you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. You can also use third-party apps for measuring and tracking the posts you’re interested in. Another helpful tool you can use for tracking website engagement and traffic is Google Analytics. With this tool, you can see how long your audience stays on your landing page, the social media content with the most engagement, plus other useful metrics.

The same social media analytics tool can give you reports that you can use for comparison. Check in regularly on your metrics and compare them with your competitors or related campaigns.

Ensure the tools you use to measure your social media performance align with your goals. Using the right tools and metrics will help you capture the right data and also help you easily analyze and compare your results.

Create Reports on Social Media Activity

Come up with a schedule for regular reporting. In your reports, include important metrics and information and put it in such a way that other stakeholders can easily understand. You can also use graphs or infographics to present your data in a way that can quickly communicate your results.

Reports are not only useful for your stakeholders, but they can also help you get a clearer picture of how your social media campaigns are doing. You can also use reports to track your progress over time. Such data can also help you determine if your marketing campaigns are cost-effective or if you need to allocate more money to one social media platform compared to the others.

Simply put, your campaign reports can help you draw a good conclusion on which campaigns serve you best, which ones need improvement, and where you need to cut your budget.

Fix the Errors

The final step is to carefully review your measurement results and fix any areas that need improvement. Check your goals again and ensure your metrics are well aligned with them.

Also, check your measurement program regularly and rectify any errors. Check if you’re missing anything or if there are unnecessary metrics that you need to do away with.

Figure out what changes you need to make and measure one more time.  For instance, if your conversion rates are low, you can A/B test your CTA buttons. Similarly, if you’re not getting sales on your website, you might try to tweak your ad content or landing page.

Conclusion

Measuring the success of your social media marketing efforts can help track your progress.  Past social media campaign measurement can also help inform your future campaigns.

Hopefully, after reading this article, measuring your SMM efforts will now be much easier. And if you aren’t already measuring your social media campaigns, you can get started by following the above steps.