How To Tell If Your Social Media Strategy Is Working

Are you using social media to promote your business? If so, it’s important to ensure that your efforts are paying off. In this blog, we’ll share some key social media metrics that you can monitor to assess whether your social media is working. By tracking this data, you can adjust your strategy to get the most out of your?social media marketing.

Where To Find Social Media Metrics

Every social media platform has different analytics and reporting interfaces. The names of the metrics may vary per channel, but we will talk about the core key performance indicators (KPIs) that are generalised across social media.

For Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, the social media metrics are found in the Insights tab. In order to view Insights, you must have a Business Page for Facebook, a Company Page for LinkedIn and a Business or Creator Account for Instagram.

If you’re starting with a limited marketing budget, visiting these reports regularly per platform will provide you with guidance on what is and isn’t working. For those of you who find generating the data separately for each platform time consuming, then we recommend investing in a?social media reporting tool?that fits your budget.?

Social Media Metrics To Track?

Engagement?

Engagement is how many and often social users interact with your account. It gives a snapshot of how your content is resonating with your audience. Engagement may consist of LIKEs, COMMENTs, SHAREs, CLICKs, SAVEs, STORY VIEWS and ACCOUNT MENTIONS.?

When creating or tweaking your social media marketing strategy, it’s best to look at engagement as a whole and avoid focusing on one subcategory alone. For example, a post that doesn’t receive many likes but lots of shares isn’t necessarily a negative. If there is a specific call to action, such as “Comment below” or “Sign Up Now”, and users are not responding, then you may have to take a second look at the content.

Growth Rate and Awareness?

FOLLOWERS and REACH?are two important KPIs when the goal is to increase page growth and brand awareness. Followers are the number of users following your page. Reach is the number of followers who have seen your posts. It indicates your content’s rate of visibility, giving an idea of its?potential?to gain engagement solely based on the number of people who have seen the post.

Some may perceive Followers as a vanity metric but it goes hand in hand with Reach. When creating a strategy and setting a goal to increase your brand Reach, you must know how many social media Followers you have managed to gather over time.?

Take a look at the period when you were generating the highest followers and see what type of content you posted. How many users are you now attracting with your current content? If your brand Reach is high but you’re not getting new Followers, then, it may be time to tweak the type of content you share.

Keep in mind that having a large number of Followers and Reach does not necessarily equate to a high engagement rate. Creating?valuable content that is interesting and compelling?is still a vital key to boosting engagement.?

Return on Investment (ROI)

Of course, if you’re investing time and budget into social media marketing, the main thing you want to track is your return on investment. How do you do this? By assessing how many enquiries or/and sales came to your website or to your business directly via social media.

You can track this via?Google Analytics?if it’s set up correctly. When looking at reporting then ‘Social” is usually the medium you’ll be monitoring. It’s also broken down by network to give the specific source.

Finally, you can track direct sales and messages via Social Media using a customer relationship manager. If you have an ecommerce store, this will be easy to set up and track.

Importance of Tracking Social Media Metrics

Understanding and measuring these basic social media metrics can help determine whether your social media marketing strategy is working and if you’re achieving your goals. Keep track of these numbers and adjust your strategy accordingly to get the most out of your social media efforts.

As Peter Drucker said, “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.”

Ready to start getting better results from your social media? Feel free to?contact us. We’ll be happy to help.