Social media is not just about posting content and getting likes. It's also about building and engaging with a community of followers who share your values, interests, and goals. But how do you measure the impact of your social media community on your brand, your business, or your cause? Here are some tips to help you gauge your community's influence, reach, and loyalty.
Before you can assess your community's impact, you need to define what you want to achieve with your social media presence. Do you want to increase awareness, generate leads, drive sales, or foster advocacy? Depending on your objectives, you will need different metrics and tools to track your progress and performance. For example, if you want to raise awareness, you might focus on impressions, reach, and mentions. If you want to generate leads, you might look at clicks, conversions, and cost per lead.
Assessing your community's impact takes a balanced scorecard like judging Olympic events. Look beyond vanity metrics to quantify business value driven. But also consider engagement, advocacy, and lives enriched through anecdotes. Blend data and stories to appreciate the collective achievement. Tally up those fan scores to showcase the full spectrum of your social community power! ??
Once you have your objectives, you need to choose the metrics that best reflect your community's impact. Metrics are quantitative indicators that measure specific aspects of your social media activity, such as engagement, sentiment, retention, or referrals. For example, engagement looks at how much your community interacts with your content; sentiment evaluates how they feel about your brand or topics; retention tracks how long they stay with you; and referrals measure how much your community spreads the word about you.
It is essential to choose relevant metrics in gauging a social media community's impact, and then conscientiously monitor them. At the same time, a GOOD social media community manager will know how things are going without looking at analytics, based on experience and intuition. Be open to the possibility that most optimal metrics may not have been chosen, and then adjust. Especially when you notice amazing things happening that you didn't expect! Example: Your goal was to achieve donations for a cause (like helping Maui residents after the fire), and you fell short of your donation goal. But instead, donations were good AND you formed multiple chapters of your organization. You've multiplied potential - BIG WIN!! Adjust ... continue.
To collect and analyze your metrics, you need to use the right tools for your platform, budget, and needs. For this, you can use the built-in features of each social media platform, such as Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, or Instagram Insights. You can also opt for external applications that offer more advanced and customized data and insights, such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Buffer. Additionally, you can employ direct methods of asking your community for feedback and opinions, such as Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, or Facebook Polls.
To evaluate your community's impact, you need to compare your metrics with a baseline or a reference point. This can help you identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. When benchmarking and comparing your metrics, you should consider your own history - such as month-over-month or year-over-year changes - and goals - such as target numbers or percentages. Additionally, you should assess how your metrics have performed against competitors, like market share or reputation.
A few thoughts on benchmarking success [I'm defining as engagement and conversion] with your social media community - especially if your audience sits in the Gen Z or young Millennial range: 1. Demonstrate an in-depth understanding of the issues your users are interested in and the values they hold, and then prioritize the ones which connect to your brand to drive impact across channel / format. 2. Co-create your brand with young people who hold a mutual interest in your offering and allow them to help shape your user community (e.g., mod rights or voting rights) and future direction. 3. Instill shared values and purpose throughout the brand and achieve measurable impact (and keep your community updated) on mutually defined goals.
Finally, to optimize your community's impact, you need to adjust and improve your strategy based on your findings. Utilizing the SMART framework to set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals and actions can be useful. For instance, you could aim to increase engagement rate by 10% in the next quarter through posting more interactive and user-generated content. Or improve sentiment score by 5 points in the next month by responding to comments and reviews promptly and positively. You could also reduce churn rate by 15% in the next year through offering more incentives and rewards for loyal followers. And grow referrals by 20% in the next six months via launching a referral program and encouraging user testimonials. Following these tips can help you measure your social media community's impact and leverage it to reach your objectives.
Optimization is truly the key to on-going success. Social media is a very dynamic environment. Trends have a high impact and what worked today does not always work tomorrow. Longevity requires tracking data and regular review to know when to make adjustments to your strategy.
While content is king, don't forget to focus on what your community gets out of its relationship and engagement with your brand. Especially for younger consumers, participation, co-creation and real influence is becoming tablestakes. Whether it’s through ambassador networks, membership programs, special events, user-generated content, or joining a brand’s Gen Z-Council, the world’s best Gen Z brands give their community a place to bring other like-minded individuals into the brand’s story, the motivation to keep them engaged, and a seat at the most important tables.
Every time I hear brands or agencies talk about social media the focus is on content, content, and content. I feel like the groundwork is in creating sustainable relationships with your audience and yes, giving them relevant content. However, I feel like that overall conversation is missing on these platforms. It's a two-way medium and brands/agencies are so consumed with making the next viral piece of content or hoping on the latest trend that they fail in actual day-to-day engagement.