Is Your Social Media Strategy Effective?

Measuring the success of campaigns is a vital facet of marketing. It is essential to view how your marketing efforts are contributing to the organization’s bottom line. If you are engaging in social media, then you should be measuring those activities. What is the best way to measure the effectiveness of your social media content?

 Determine your social media goals.

Before posting about your brand, you need to identify your social media goals and objectives. What is your organization trying to accomplish? Define your target audience and which social media outlets they utilize. Think about the desired response of your audience. Are you seeking engagement through clicks, shares, purchases or replies? Once a response is decided, create strategies to establish which channels will help you meet your objectives.

 Determine your targeted metrics.

What and how you measure your activity will depend on your established goals. What are you seeking to gain from your social media? This is the number one question as you consider which statistics to track. What are some of the benchmarks that can measure effectiveness of your goals? Common benchmarks include:

• Engagement: These metrics center on the quantity of your audience’s participants, replies and comments.
• Traffic: These metrics track website clicks, conversions and URL shares.
• Awareness: These metrics include reach, volume and the number of fans and followers.

Measure your progress.

Effective social media metrics measure both ongoing and campaign-centered metrics. Ongoing Analytics gauge the conversation about your brand. Check these regularly. Campaign-centered metrics assess the effectiveness of targeted marketing initiatives and will vary from each campaign. There are a variety of social media management tools that will enable you to monitor every aspect of your social activity. Here are just a few:

• Facebook Insights: This dashboard provides analytics data to measure the success of your Facebook activity, audience demographics, what audience is reacting to and peak traffic.
• Twitter Analytics: Twitter Analytics can track timeline activity, including tweets that were marked as favorite, re-tweeted and replied to. This tool also tracks number of mentions, new followers and newly followed.
• Google Analytics: Google Analytics tracks social media traffic and the success of a specific link within a campaign.

Report the status of your metrics.

Once you have calculated your metrics, report your results. Be sure to include benchmarks and graphs of your data that clearly communicates the results of your social media activities to your stakeholders. How do your results compare to your established goals?  Establish a reporting schedule that best suits your overall strategy. Whether weekly, monthly or quarterly reporting, ensure to report regularly in order to measure success of your current social media strategy.

 Knowledge of the metrics you are tracking and why is critical when tracking the success of your social media channels.  Is your content positively affecting your organization’s bottom line? Are you meeting your organization’s social media goals? Whether it is to create brand awareness, increase sales, or drive website traffic, every organization should embark on a social strategy plan.