Measuring Social Media Success
What is social media success?
For social media to be considered a success, it needs to support sales conversions. Whilst the platform can serve as a brand awareness tool, this really isn’t its end goal and is ultimately the root cause for a lot of frustration around using these platforms as marketing tools.
Social media can be considered successful when it’s supported other marketing communications and tools, assisting in converting a potential customer into a sale or a lead. Having considered social media as part of your marketing strategy and how you use this to create social media content, we can use the data provided through the social media platforms to analyse how these are supporting our marketing campaign.
Why do I need social media success?
A lot of social media campaigns begin without objectives or measurement criteria in place. Before you begin any social media campaign, are you looking to:
- Target new customers online to drive them through to your website where they convert?
- Increase conversions within your existing campaign, driving them back to your website through social media remarketing?
- Target existing followers on your social media page, driving them through to your website?
It’s fundamental, as with any part of a marketing campaign, to define what success looks like.
What benefits will my business see from measuring social media success?
By understanding your campaign objectives and how they fit in with the rest of your marketing, you will have clearly defined what success looks like. Even in successful marketing campaigns where social media is bringing a clear benefit, without analysis, without an understanding of your objectives, you can’t hope to make it even more successful.
Social media campaigns are highly measurable both on the platform itself and across your marketing campaign. Using Facebook as an example, campaigns you run will provide you with the following statistics:
- Budget spent.
- Number of engagements – number of people who liked/ loved or reacted to your post.
- Number of people reached – number of individual people your post reached.
- Number of impressions – number of times your post showed up in peoples Facebook feeds (one person can see a post multiple times).
- Cost per Result – How much it’s cost to get your desired result.
These headline statistics are useful for allowing you to see if the campaign is effective at engaging your audience. The real benefit comes from understanding which adverts are performing better through A/B testing. This allows you to direct more budget into the adverts which are attracting more of your audience.
It’s important we not only look at the success of attracting your target audience to your website but look at the influence the campaign is having on conversions themselves. This can be achieved through creating what we call a UTM Tracking Code on any Facebook advert. This is a short code which allows you to track the performance of each individual advert in sending traffic to the website.
Having this level of detail through running A/B tests and analysing conversions between adverts, will allow you to create more messaging which performs in the future and fix areas of the campaign where the messaging isn’t performing, through either making amendments or getting rid of this part altogether.
How do I measure social media success?
To allow measurement of your social media campaigns, it’ll be important to familiarise yourself with the back end of Facebooks Ads Manager.
To understand how to use Google Analytics to measure your campaigns success click here.
To setup a UTM Code, Google provide some useful advice.
If you need any support defining your social media objectives or in setting up tracking for your social media campaigns, we’d be happy to provide some support free of charge.
In addition, if you’re just starting out we can provide a social media audit free of charge, along with producing recommendations to improve your sales and lead generation. Get in touch here.
What else do I need to know?
Social media is a great tool for brand awareness, however without an end goal and marketing strategy such campaigns don’t often reach their full potential, which ultimately is sales and leads.
Setting up the appropriate tracking at the beginning of your campaign, using the appropriate tools provides you with an overview of what is working well and what isn’t working so well each month.
Use this information effectively, alongside a marketing campaign which considers:
- Research
- Strategy
- Communications and design
- and Measurement
This will set you and your business up for marketing success.
At Need to Know Marketing we love providing information for SME’s so they can grow. We also understand this work can be time consuming and difficult to begin with. To assist you, we provide a free of charge one hour consultation, where we have an open discussion about your business objectives and what you’re looking to achieve.
Following the consultation we will provide you with a marketing strategy, advising how we recommend meeting your business objectives through marketing. If you are interested in knowing the cost of our services, you can use our calculator as a guide.
“Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.”
Walt Disney knew telling a story is always always easier with pictures. It crosses all barriers. The best story tellers are always the best at engaging their audience.