Measuring your success in social media marketing is more than just checking to see how many likes and follows you have accumulated. These may prove that you can create quality content that people want to see or perhaps you ran a great campaign to gain likes and follows, but now what? How do you know if these followers will interact and actually create some type of business that is measurable?
There are three basic measures to see if your social media marketing plan is working: reach, engagement and conversion. We covered these in detail in another blog (check it out here), so we will just give the highlights here:
REACH – How many people could have seen your message.
ENGAGEMENT – How many people did see your message and reacted.
CONVERSION – How many people followed through on an action.
Some other items to consider tracking are:
- Reactions for Your Posts
- Mentions/Tags
- Audience Demographics
- Replies and Comments for Your Posts
- Shared Content
- Referral Traffic
- Click Rates
Let’s begin with a more detailed look at how to check each of these measures.
Examples of Reach metrics include:
- Connections on LinkedIn
- Followers on Twitter
- Likes on Facebook page
- Views and Subscribers on YouTube channel
- Visitors to blog
- Likes and Followers on Tiktok
Examples of Engagement metrics include:
- Clicks on links from social media posts
- Retweets, Mentions and Direct Messages on Twitter
- Shares on Facebook and LinkedIn
- Comments on Facebook and LinkedIn posts
- Ratings on YouTube videos
- Comments on blog posts
- Comments on Tiktok videos
Examples of Conversion metrics include:
- Registrations for content downloads
- Opt In for Newsletter Registration
- Webinar registrations
- Online form completions (lead generation)
- Phone-in leads
- Online sales
- Print coupon or request discount code
Let’s go over Facebook Insights as an example of the kind of detailed analysis many social media platforms offer and we’ll touch on a few Google Analytics that might be helpful as well.
On your Facebook Business Page, go to the left column and click on Insights. Here are the basic measures for each:
Overview: Page Summary, Reach, Content and Audience
Results: Reach, Visits, New Likes
Audience: Demographic Data – women, men, city, language, country.
Feedback: Rating, Responses
Benchmarking: Compare your business with others
Overview – Content: Reach, Engagement
Content: All Content posted and its performance
Google Analytics can help with social media goals also. However, these metrics are specific to your website traffic and can be used to see if the content you created actually converted to your website, if that was your intention.
Under Reports Snapshot in the left navigation, you will find a quick overview of the performance and traffic for your website. It shows users, where they come from and what they did while on your site. It’s a good basic overview.
If you want to go into further detail,
Life Cycle:
- Acquisition: Shows basic information on total sessions from social network like session counts, page views, duration and pages visited.
- Engagement: What users did once they reached your site.
Users:
- Demographics: Data about your users – women, men, city, language, country.
- Tech: What Devices / Software/ Browser for your users
Now to analyze what you have just seen. Use this data to help you know if what you are already posting is profitable or needs some work. Although a post may be well received with your audience and has great engagement, the bottom line is … did it bring me business? Use this data to help you know your audience and refine your postings. It is good to capture their attention, but did your post create a response? By using the data to check your social media post performance, you can decide if you are reaching the target you want. Keep trying new ideas and different types of posts to see what the reaction is. You might be surprised. Learn from the data given how to communicate better and more targeted.
Monitoring your business performance online is extremely important to know if what you are posting is actually having a real return on investment. Even if you aren’t spending money to boost or promote your posts, keeping a close eye on your audience metrics is very crucial. It’s the best way to create targeted, customized content to improve engagement with your target market.
When measuring your success on social media, there are a lot of factors and data to consider. Many social media platforms make it simple by providing a tool of their own to help with these measures. The best advice is to keep trying, keep checking your stats and then make improvements. Social media marketing is creating a response and action that is beneficial to both you and your viewers!