How do you know if social media is helping your strategy?

1 Define your goals and objectives

The first step to assess your social media performance is to clarify what you want to achieve with your strategy. Do you want to raise awareness, generate leads, build trust, or drive action? Your goals and objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). For example, you might want to increase your website traffic by 10% in the next quarter, or grow your followers by 15% in the next month.

2 Choose your key performance indicators (KPIs)

Once you have your goals and objectives, you need to identify the metrics that will help you track your progress and evaluate your outcomes. These are your key performance indicators (KPIs), and they should align with your goals and objectives. For example, if your goal is to increase website traffic, your KPIs might include clicks, referrals, bounce rate, and conversions. If your goal is to grow your followers, your KPIs might include impressions, reach, engagement, and growth rate.

3 Use the right tools and platforms

To measure your KPIs, you need to use the right tools and platforms that can provide you with accurate and reliable data. Native analytics features of each social media platform, such as Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Instagram Insights, YouTube Analytics, can give you insights into your audience demographics, behavior, preferences, and feedback. Additionally, third-party tools and apps like Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social can help you manage, monitor, and analyze your social media activity. You can also use web analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to measure website performance and track traffic sources. This way you can understand how your social media strategy affects your website performance - such as how many visitors come from social media, how long they stay on your website, what pages they visit, and what actions they take.

4 Benchmark and compare your results

To evaluate if your social media strategy is helping you reach your goals, it's important to benchmark and compare your results over time and across platforms. This can be done by establishing a baseline for your current performance by comparing it with your previous performance, such as monthly or quarterly results with yearly results or a current campaign with a past campaign. Additionally, you can set a target for desired performance and compare it with the actual performance. For instance, you can compare the current results to your SMART goals and objectives or the expected results to the actual results. Lastly, you can set a standard for industry or niche performance and compare it to your own performance, such as comparing your results to the average of your industry or niche or to the best practices and benchmarks of your industry or niche.

5 Adjust and improve your strategy

The final step to evaluate your social media strategy is to adjust and improve it based on your findings and feedback. You can identify what works and what doesn't work for your strategy by analyzing the types of content, formats, channels, timings, and tones that generate the most positive results and engagement. Additionally, you can test and experiment with different variables and options for your strategy, such as different headlines, captions, hashtags, images, videos, calls to action etc. Moreover, you can implement the best practices and solutions that you have learned from your analysis, testing, and experimentation in order to optimize your future posts, campaigns, and plans.

6 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?