How can you measure social media success beyond likes and followers?

1 Define your objectives

Before you start measuring anything, you need to define what you want to achieve with your social media activities. What are your specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives? Do you want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, drive traffic, boost sales, or improve customer loyalty? Depending on your objectives, you will need to choose different metrics to track and analyze your social media success.

2 Choose relevant metrics

Once you have your objectives, you need to select the metrics that will help you measure your progress and results. There are many types of metrics you can use, but they can be broadly categorized into four groups: awareness, engagement, conversion, and retention. Awareness metrics measure how many people see and recognize your brand on social media, such as reach, impressions, mentions, and share of voice. Engagement metrics measure how much people interact with your content and brand, such as likes, comments, shares, clicks, and time spent. Conversion metrics measure how many people take a desired action after engaging with your content, such as sign-ups, downloads, purchases, or referrals. Retention metrics measure how many people stay loyal and satisfied with your brand, such as retention rate, churn rate, customer lifetime value, and net promoter score.

3 Use the right tools

To measure your social media metrics, you need to use the right tools that can collect, analyze, and visualize your data. There are many tools available, both free and paid, that can help you with social media measurement. Some of the most popular ones are Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Instagram Insights, LinkedIn Analytics, and Hootsuite. These tools can help you track and compare your metrics across different platforms, channels, and campaigns, and generate reports and dashboards that can help you understand your social media performance.

4 Interpret and improve

The final step of measuring your social media success is to interpret your data and use it to improve your strategy and tactics. You need to compare your metrics with your objectives, benchmarks, and competitors, and identify what is working well and what needs improvement. You also need to test different variables, such as content types, formats, topics, tones, frequencies, and timings, and see how they affect your metrics. By doing this, you can optimize your social media activities and achieve better results.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?