How to improve the quality of your social media content

Many marketers simply run through the creation process, seeing their ideas through to production and publication without a plan for how they will optimise their content through data and learnings over time.

Instead, social media provides us with an opportunity to test new ideas, segment our audiences, and tweak our creative approach to provide the best possible content to our audiences.

What are the different ways to measure performance in social media?

Social media metrics usually stem from a few different categories which cover key objectives such as engagement, conversion, sentiment and exposure.

Engagement

How deep is the relationship between the brand and its followers/ customers? Engagement is important in building reach and loyalty.

• Is there a correlation between engagement and content type?
• Are there certain photos or creative assets that do better than others?
• How many times has someone marked a specific post as spam?
• What types of engagements are the most popular (usually it will be those which require the least commitment e.g. a like or a retweet).
• What was going on in the user’s world at the time a post was made? Think about news headlines, seasonal events, or life stage milestones.

Conversion

Vital for sales or to encourage sharing. Driving action is important in all marketing but is sometimes forgotten in social media.

• If there was a call-to-action on a post, did users respond in the desired manner?
• Did they click the link to view your content?
• Did they answer the question?
• Did they sign up for your newsletter?
• Did they play a video/buy something?
• If not, what did they do instead (if anything)?
• How are social platforms driving traffic to the brand’s website?
• What is the conversion from social commerce buttons?

Sentiment

How do people feel about your brand? Typically sentiment is measured as positive, negative or neutral.

• What is the nature of the content-based comments posts receive?
• What is the nature of the messages and feedback communities provide unrelated to content? Testimonials or praise? Complaints? Neutral items (like questions)?
• What is the nature of the conversation about the brand (this requires social media listening)?

Exposure

It is important to understand reach in context. A high level of exposure may not be as important as reaching a small number of specific individuals.

• How many people saw your content compared to the number of people in your fan base?
• What’s the average reach, per platform?
• Is there a trend (e.g. time of day, day of the week etc.) where things are higher or lower than the average?