So, you’ve researched your market. You’ve developed a social media strategy that is bound to improve lead generation. You’ve even A/B tested a few different types of creative. But how exactly do you know if your social media marketing has been a success?
Social media marketing is a unique form of marketing in regard to how much data is readily available free and easy. This makes measuring your marketing efforts far more straightforward to measure than some other, more traditional forms of communication. It’s so important to measure the impact your social media marketing so you can make better informed, data-driven decisions in the future.
Below are some of the metrics that we use to measure our social media marketing efforts. They’re all simple and easy tricks you can use immediately to measure your organic or paid social media marketing.
1) Reach
Social media reach is defined as the estimated number of unique people that could have come into contact with a post on a particular social media platform. Of course, this metric will be improved by the number of followers your social media page has, but its also affected by another metric, engagement. This is because when a user engages with a post, either by liking, commenting, or retweeting, it shares that post with all of their online connections, further expanding the reach. Reach is not to be confused with impressions, a different metric that measures the total number of views a post gets. The total number of impressions includes multiple views from the same user, whereas reach measures only the number of users that saw the post.
Keeping track of this metric is essential in order to know the size of your audience, and it is a great way to track how successful your social media strategy is performing. Ultimately, you want as many eyeballs to see your posts as possible, so an increase in reach over time means your strategy is performing well.
2) Engagement
Just as reach is intrinsically linked to engagement, engagement is just as affected by reach. The thing with engagement metrics is that what you measure depends on what your social media objectives are. There are many different types of engagement, and what engagement metrics you measure will depend on what platforms you use. On most platforms, ’ users can share content increasing the amount of social media users that see and potentially interact with your messages. And if your social media objective is to spread a message, sharing metrics such as likes, retweets and shares will be the most useful data to monitor. However, engagement is about more than that. If your objectives are more about generating interest and interaction in a particular social media post, then the number of comments and replies are a more suitable metric to measure.
Keeping track of these metrics on each post will help shape your social media strategy. Start thinking about what content you’re going to post in the future based on what has worked well, in terms of engagement, in the past. Let the data drive your content decisions.
3) Referrals and Conversions
Social media can be a great way of acquiring new traffic for your website. Tools such as Google Analytics allow you to track traffic that’s coming from social media. It will even give you a breakdown of what portion of your traffic is coming from each platform. You can take this metric a step further by monitoring the number of social conversions, the number of people who visit the website and then perform a chosen action. It’s always a great feeling when your social media post gets a high reach and engagement rate, but these metrics do not necessarily directly impact revenue. That’s where referral and conversion metrics come into their own.
For a lot of e-commerce websites or websites where the customer can make a purchase of sorts, this metric will be the most important. Measuring the conversion rate is an excellent way of measuring the return on investment of your paid social media advertising. The click-through rate, which can be monitored in the Facebook Ad Centre or other equivalent social media advertising platforms, is also a useful metric to work out the return on investment. Although, a better way to measure website traffic in this context is landing page views, as it requires the user to spend a certain amount of time on the desired web page, rather than immediately clicking off. But more about that in a moment.
4) Bounce Rate
So, you are happy with your referral rate, but this extra website traffic still doesn’t seem to be resulting in more sales. Well, that could be that when users enter your site, they’re immediately leaving. Of course, this could be for several reasons, be it the website being difficult to navigate or the user simply not being interested in the website’s offering. A great way to measure this is the bounce rate. Bounce rate measures the number of users who entered your site and then immediately left. In the context of bounce rate, you want the number to be as low as possible. This would mean that once users’ have entered the website from social media, they are engaged and interested in interacting with your site. However, if your social traffic has a high bounce rate that may be an indicator that the content on your social media or social media advertising is misleading potential customers. When they visit the website, they are left disappointed.
This metric can also be measured using Google Analytics in the channel acquisition section.
5) Competitor Monitoring
In addition to your own metrics, what social media also allows you to do is keep a close eye on your competition. Facebook publishing tools has a section where you can monitor the activity of your competitors. You won’t be able to see the same level of detail that you do about your own posts, but the content that generates the most engagement will be apparent for all to see.
There aren’t many other forms of media in which you can get actual data about competitors marketing activity, so this information can be particularly beneficial. This is because your competitors are likely to have similar social media audiences to you. Therefore, you can learn a great deal about what kinds of content appeal to that audience and learn from their successes and mistakes.
The great thing about social media metrics is how available they are to every business user. All the major platforms provide you with an awful lot of data that you can analyse and evaluate. All of the above metrics can be easily monitored natively on social media or by using free tools such as Google Analytics.
