In this modern digital age, social media plays an indispensable part in the online success of any brand within the virtual space. You know your market quite well, you are happy in keeping your audience engaged, you might be posting frequently and using unique content in your postings on various platforms. At the end of everything, the big question which lies ahead is how successful are your social media campaigns. You need to know what is working and what is not.
There are a variety of different social media platforms with varied audiences and your efforts are getting wasted if they are being put into one specific platform. You need to watch where your intended audience falls and then put all your efforts in driving them to ultimately your website and developing your brand identity. Here we have outlined some methods and techniques which will help you in assessing the overall success of your social media marketing efforts.
Set Clear Goals & Strategy in Place
Spend enough time thinking about your vision of success so that you can start planning about the right kind of metrics required for it. Business objectives need to be specific followed by social objectives. Social media might not be the ultimate solution to everything but it sure is a wonderful means to attain online promotional success for your brand.
In order to measure the success of all your social media efforts, you need to set certain goals and objectives to aim for and the reason each of them is being labeled as a success measure. You definitely need to act smart and start following a definite strategy which is effective so that you can continue modifying or improving it with passage of time, as and when required.
Cost Incurred
It also becomes imperative for any business involved in social media promotions to assess how much time they have saved and whether they are able to see a clear ‘ROI’ (Return on investment). The Costs include costs of various social tools, paid content, paid social ads plus man hours. After calculating it by the age old formula which says (Earnings – Costs) x 100 / Costs for all your paid social media campaigns, it becomes more clear to see how well your paid campaigns are working and in case if you have hardly anything to show for it, that can be termed as a cause for alarm bells! And that you are going in the wrong direction.
Analysing your Brand Recognition & Influencers
Social Media is a great way for brand recognition. Make use of certain readily available tools which can be helpful in searching your brand name and an indication of the sentiment created from all the posts which mention your brand. This helps you understand the kind of impression your brand carries and how it is perceived in the digital space. In fact, if in certain situations you turn out to be lucky enough to be noticed by an industry expert or an influencer by their retweets or mentioned in discussions, you should know that you are on the right track and that you are doing social media in the right way.
Measure your Reach
A very important factor which you would want to consider is to measure your ‘reach’. If you go by these numbers and conclude that your reach is not enough to gather a huge audience, this means that you are doing something wrong in your postings, which is not striking a chord within the audience. Its reach will give you a solid understanding of how well is the content created by you being appreciated by the intended niche audience.
The number of likes on Facebook, number of followers on Twitter, connections on LinkedIn, number of subscribers on YouTube and even the number of visitors on your company blog are all indicators of the reach your social media campaigns have accumulated over a period of time.
Measure your Engagement
After viewing your post/message, you would want to know the number of people who have taken any further action. You need to also understand that if the quality of your content is low or if it is not able to generate any interest and inspiration to act further, the level of engagement will be quite low.
A few of the factors which can indicate the level of engagement with your audience include click on links in all your posts, how many times your tweets are retweeted, direct messages received on Twitter, number of comments on the Facebook account, shares you get on Facebook and the number of comments you get on your blog posts. Keeping a track of these numbers can be achieved by using tools already available on each platform separately and even by using third party services.
Measuring Conversion
The most significant factor in understanding the success of your social media campaigns is the Conversion factor. Conversion actually indicates the number of people who took the next step in ultimately joining your marketing database. Some of the indicators used to calculate your conversions include the number of registrations you get for downloads, online form completions for lead generation, webinar registrations and so forth. For measuring conversion, a number of free resources can be used which includes primarily Google Analytics.
The first step is to set up Google Analytics and use it while integrating it with the website activity. Use campaign tracking feature available in this analytical tool for your social media posts. This analytical tool will also give you info about the number of daily visits to your website, their frequency of visiting the website, which of the content postings are most popular etc. Some of the other parameters you can optimize on Google Analytics are channels, campaigns, content and so forth.
Other measuring tools include Export.ly, which helps analyze your Facebook page, RowFeeder which provides the info about what people are saying about your brand and TweetReach to understand how many of your tweets are being retweeted and by whom. In fact, there are a number of various social media dash boards available that allow you to post as well as measure the success of each and every social media post. These include Hootsuite, SproutSocial etc. which can enable you to have a great overview of achieving social media success.