Social Media Campaign – The rule for success is simple: if you’re using social media for your business, you must measure it. Measuring social media activities is crucial for determining which tactics work and which don’t and finding ways to improve.
There are two ways of measuring social media success: campaign-focused analytics, and ongoing metrics. Campaign-focused analytics help you understand the impact of targeted marketing efforts and vary depending on our goals for each campaign. Ongoing metrics, on the other hand, track activity over time.
In today’s read, we’re focusing on the most important steps for measuring a social media campaign’s performance.
Table of Contents
Determine Your Goals
Setting attainable goals is the foundation of any social media campaign. Whether it’s brand awareness, sales boost, or attracting more viewers, you need to set your objective from the beginning.
Think about that what you want to accomplish through social media and which platforms are most relevant to those goals. When you know what are you trying to accomplish and why it will be easier to measure your performance. Using the SMART framework can help you keep your goals specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound, increasing the likelihood of achieving them.
Set KPIs and Measure
The next step is to tie your goals with metrics you can measure. Engagement, reach, and followers growth are some of the top social metrics you may want to measure. You can obtain social media data from native analytics or you can use a measurement tool for a more in-depth understanding of the results.
Follower Growth
Measuring social follower growth is crucial for understanding how your audience responds to your actions and which posts, campaigns, or ads have helped you gain the most followers. Now, you may be tempted to resort to a fast solution to obtaining more followers. Growth services can be helpful with this but you should be careful.
Providers such as Ingramer, for example, can boost your follower growth metrics on Instagram but they won’t provide you with long-term followers and might get your account banned. Instead, always rely on reputable growth services to acquire genuine and highly engaged followers.
Engagement
The engagement rate is one of the maximum critical social measurements. Getting high engagement means you’ve attracted the attention of your target audience and managed to establish a strong emotional connection. There are several different engagement metrics you should look at—likes, comments, shares, and account mentions are the most important ones. Instead of measuring these metrics in isolation, it’s best to look at a combination of them to get a more accurate picture.
For example, if a post with a CTA gets many likes but no comments, it might be a sign that your caption wasn’t optimized well.
Reach
Social media reach indicates the number of unique post views. To determine the effectiveness of a social media campaign, you should track the daily reach on posts within your campaign and the average reach for the time your campaign is running. It’s advisable to use reach as a metric with caution as it’s often an estimated figure. However, it’s very helpful in quantifying the size of your potential audience.
Impressions
Impressions tell you the number of times the content has been displayed. Seeing a high impressions number means that you have a loyal and dedicated audience that shows interest in what you have to offer.
Report
Use your findings to set a benchmark for future measurement. Also, share the figures with the stakeholders. Before curating the report, determine how those numbers compare to what you expected at the beginning of the campaign and how do they compare to relevant competitors’ campaigns.
In the report, include the benchmark and other contextual information so that it’s clear to the stakeholders what the data means. You can also include graphics and charts to communicate the results clearly and make it easier for everyone to grasp the success of the campaign.
Review and Repeat
The final step in calculating the success of a social media campaign is to review your measurement strategy. Figure out if there’s something you’ve missed out on or anything that was unnecessary. Go back to the goals you have set and ensure that the adjusted metrics are helpful in addressing those objectives. Uncover what you can change and how you can improve, and then measure again.
Final Words
If you’re investing time and also resources in social media campaigns, it’s crucial to understand how is your performance. By following these steps you can obtain reliable and consistent analytics that help you accurately measure your success. You’ll learn whether social media strategy actually helps you meet your company’s goals and how you can improve it.
