Measuring the success of social media marketing
As with all forms of digital marketing, measuring the success of your social media programme is important as it shows you how successful a campaign is and if it is achieving the objectives it set out to.
Earlier in the course we spoke about defining a social media strategy. A big part of this is defining the most important goals for your social media strategy. Some may choose to prioritize increasing customer service and driving website traffic whereas others may focus on increasing brand awareness or generating new leads.
Once you have defined your social media marketing goals, you can determine which KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) will effectively measure your success e.g., social media performance. A KPI is anything quantifiable, such as follower count (which is the number of people following you or your brand on a social media channel), or engagement rate (which is the percentage of an audience to engage with a piece of content they see).
For example, if your social media objective was to grow your follower community, your KPI would be fan growth. The KPIs which are most relevant to your business will vary depending on what business objectives you’re trying to achieve with social media.
Most social media platforms now have their own analytics tool which you can use. For example, Facebook have developed an Insights tool and Twitter have created Twitter Analytics. These tools can produce reports which show how your content is performing e.g., the times of the day where people are engaging with your content the most or the number of followers you gained after posting a certain post. Tools like this can save time and money and are an easy way to pull metrics from social media platforms.
Look at the infographic below which shows you some of the top KPIs for the most popular social media channels.
Click on the infographic to view the image full size in your browser, if you do this remember to click the back button to get back onto this page. You can also download a PDF using the link at the bottom of this step.
Are there any other KPIs you can think of that a brand can use to measure their social media activity? Put your thoughts below in the comments.
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