A strong social media presence is essential for any brand or business to have. All social platforms have options to share content, but how do you measure the success of what you are posting?
Google analytics is probably the number one tool for measuring the success of any sort of marketing campaign. You can track you social shares, website bounce rate, clicks, impressions, demographic, the list goes on. It can also be extremely difficult to navigate and rather overwhelming if you aren’t very tech-savvy.
But there is hope. In this post I have listed all the ways in which we measure our success and failures. How we improve on them and use social media to our advantage.
Firstly you must decide what you want your content to achieve, what are you main goals. Trying to cram them all into one can work, but it’s better to have a clear view of the purpose of your content so you can create concise, targeted content.
GOALS - what do you want your campaign to achieve?
Growth
Growing a brand or business can be the hardest of all. It doesn’t matter how many likes your page has if those potential customers aren’t buying, you haven’t really grown your customer base. Implementing some of the tools discussed in this blog are the first steps to generating sales and growing your business.
Engagement
Do you want your customers to engage with your content? Engagement is important for brands and businesses in the sense that it helps generate buzz around your products or services. But this doesn’t generally mean all engagement translates to sales. Generating a buzz is a great way to hype up a new product and get people talking about your business. It’s also a great tool for your own target audience research.
Customer Retention
Every business wants repeat customers. This can be difficult to achieve through social media because it requires a personal touch but the long term benefits of improving your customer retention make the effort worthwhile.
Awareness
Spreading social media awareness goes hand in hand with all the points above. Measuring it can give you a good idea of your demographic, who wants to buy from you and help you narrow your target marketing. It’s not about the sales, it's about the reach.
You might want to increase all of the above, or just one major aspect. It all depends on your message. Are you launching a new clothing line or cutting edge invention, or are you an activist trying to spread the word about your passion? Whatever your message, using these key points as a measurement can help guide your campaign to success.
METRICS - how to measure the success of your social media campaign?
Growth
Measuring growth is simple. How many have signed up to your newsletter? How many sales did you make? Are you seeing more messaging conversations on Facebook? If the answer is yes you have improved your customer conversion rate.
Facebook paid ads has a great built in tool to help you measure the amount of leads are generated from a particular post an allows you to track your target audience and adjust.
It’s worth asking your new customers how they found you so you can see what other avenues outside of any paid ads are working for you. Also adding a nice personal touch to your service.
Engagement
Comments, likes, shares, mentions, new followers. All ways in which you can measure engagement. Most business profiles on social media offer the tools to check what kind of engagement you are seeing.
Try running a competition, post a viral-esque video or just encourage your peers to help you share what exciting thing you’re up to. Find out what works, what doesn’t, and go with the trends.
It’s important to stay active on social media to keep engagements flowing and to stay current. Posting once a week isn’t likely to help you grow your presence. Set measurable targets and stick with it.
Customer retention
Testimonials are your best friend when it comes to customer retention. Knowing a client has valued you enough to take the time to write a review or give a referral is priceless to your business. It gives credibility and a real life opinion as opposed to all your carefully created marketing content.
Using loyalty programs or codes to give previous customers an incentive to return is a great way to measure the success of a job or product.
In order to retain your customers you must listen to them and make them feel valued enough to return. Social media isn’t the most personable way to achieve this which is why it can be difficult. It requires you to be as engaging with your customers as they are with your content because relationships are of course a two-way street. It takes time but the results are invaluable.
Awareness
Measuring your reach might seem pointless, but if you look closely at the statistics of whose seeing your posts it can help you tailor content to suit your target audience.
Google analytics and Facebook both measure the interests, age ranges and behaviours of your audience. Although an impression might just look like a number or a click mightn’t have given you any real sales, you can still see what other competitors are doing and refine your approach to appeal to the right people.
Now that you know how to measure the success of your posts, it's worth thinking about what materials you will use to kickstart your campaign. Visual content gets much more engagement and appeals to customers more than text based posting. Posts that include images produce 650% higher engagement than text-only posts. People are 85 % more likely to buy a product after viewing a product video and posts with videos attract 3 times more egagement than text only. It's no wonder visual content has become the worlds favourite marketing tool in recent years.
Take a look at our infographic to see what kinds of creative options you could use and start sharing!
