Your social media campaign is in full swing, you’re scheduling your posts, active across Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram, linking regularly to your blog and replying to all of your fans. But, there’s one other thing you need to know – the impact of your efforts. Indeed, without being able to measure just how successful your various campaigns are (and which ones aren’t), you won’t ever be able to improve upon them.
3 steps to have an effective social media campaign measuring programme:
Metrics and Analytics
Generally speaking, social media is measure in two ways: on-going analytics, and campaign focused metrics. Your analytics are the means through which you track the overall activity on your social media accounts over time – they are what you use to keep yourself informed about the overall buzz that is being generated about your brand and business.
Your campaign focussed metrics, on the other hand, are what you use to help yourself understand the impact of your targeted marketing initiatives – your one-off sales or other promotions.
An effective social measuring programme should include both on-going analytics and campaign-specific measurements, and below we’ve put together a list of some tools and tips that you can use to help you start tracking the impact of your social media campaigns.
Reach
The first thing that you will need to measure is your reach – that is, the number of people you have managed to impact with your social media content. If no one is paying attention to you on social media, then you’re not getting it right. By working out your reach, you will have a good initial understanding of just how attractive your social content is as it stands.
So, you might want to start drawing up a spreadsheet on which you will list your amount of:
- LinkedIn connections
- Followers on Twitter
- Likes on your Facebook Page
- Views and subscribers to your YouTube channel
- Visitors to your blog
- Pinterest, Instagram and Google+ followers
- Any other followers on any other social media
As I mention above, you can of course do all of this manually using a spreadsheet, but, hopefully, the figures will be increasing at far too fast a rate for that to be a viable use of your time. So, instead, look to the analytics sections of your social media sites (nearly all of which provide these for business accounts) where it will be much easier for you to keep track of it all. Alternatively, there are third-party services like Klout or Radian6, which can keep track of your reach for you.
Engagement
Measuring engagement means working out exactly how many people actually interacted with each of your individual messages across your social media sites. This will produce a very clear indicator of exactly which types of posts your fans and followers like the most (and of course which ones they like the least). When a follower engages with a post it means that they actually care enough about it to do something with it. If your levels of engagement are low, then it is imperative that you do something about it and take a good look at how you might improve your content to increase this figure.
Engagement metrics include:
- Clicks
- Shares
- Comments
- Retweets, Mentions and Direct Messages on Twitter
- Ratings on your YouTube videos
The built-in analytics on your social media sites will keep track of all of these metrics for you, or again you can look to third-party services to keep you up-to-date.
Conversions
Measuring conversions will tell you how many of your visitors actually took action as a result of your social media messages. This is where we get into the real nitty-gritty of the business-building impact of your social media marketing efforts. This is where we measure just how many genuine leads you manage to generate.
Conversion metrics include:
- Registration for content downloads
- Online sales
- Form completions
- Email subscriptions
- Content subscriptions
- Webinar registrations
The best way to try and always make sure that your social media campaign is generating conversions is to always try and make sure that you are linking back to your website with each post that you send out. Normally, it is only here that you will truly accomplish conversions, rather than on the actual social media sites themselves (which are primarily there to drive traffic to your website which should be the hub of all your activities and efforts).
To track conversions, you will probably need to turn to third-party services, and Google Analytics is what I would recommend integrating into your website. This will track your site activity, including which of your visitors arrive from links you provide across your social media. To do this, you will have to go into the site and build trackable links for each of your social media posts. Next, set up goal tracking, which will then track all of your online conversions.
Keeping a close eye on all of these metrics, and remembering to segment all that are generate from your specific campaigns, will allow you to track your ROI from all of your social media campaigns, and identify which ones are working the hardest for you, and which ones need some focus for improvement.
Share with us in the comments below what you like to use to track your social media results!
