You spend valuable business hours strategizing your social media marketing campaign. Then you share, share, share, and share content. At the end of it all, you’ve spent as much time trying to get people to see what you have to offer as you have actually creating what you’re offering. And you have no idea how to know if it’s working.
Sound like a gloomy situation to you? Us too. Fear not, social media soldiers, there are ways to know if you are aiming your efforts at the right target. You can figure out if the time, money and effort spent pushing your social media campaign have all been for naught.
How to Measure Social Media Marketing Success
Awareness
The first step in achieving social media marketing success is to make people aware of your business’s existence. This is simply the number of people who see your social posts. All customers have a point at which they gained awareness of your business. It leads to engagement and future brand recognition.
To measure how successful your company is at gaining awareness, calculate some concrete statistics. Measure things like volume, reach, exposure, and amplification within the analytics of your accounts. Those statistics are the most accurate way to collect data of people who were actually active when your post was fresh. However, you can simply count your followers and the followers of anyone who shared your post to get a rough estimate of potential awareness.
Engagement
One step closer to converting social media marketing into profit is engagement. When anyone interacts with or has a reaction your content, it is counted as engagement. Engaging with a brand builds recognition in the future. It also creates conversations with or about your company which is a great opportunity for personal connections with future customers.
To measure engagement, look to things like retweets, shares, comments, and replies. Again, if someone engages with you in a way that puts your content on their profile, it raises the number of people that are aware of you.
Website traffic
Ah, the goal of all of your effort. Get people’s eyeballs on your expertly created website! You feel confident in the marketing tactics you’ve employed on your site. If you can just get people from your social media profile onto your website, you’ll take it from there. Right? (No? We can help.)
Generating website traffic from your social media content takes your audience one GIANT step closer to making a purchase. At the very least, they have a much better idea of what you are all about. Your style, mission, and quality are shining and creating even more brand recognition and loyalty.
Website analytics will show you how visitors reached your site. Count up how many came by way of your social posts and there you have it.
Are You Getting the Results You Hoped for?
So you measured the success of your social media marketing strategy, and it didn’t turn out to be as successful as you hoped. That’s okay! There are easy social media recipes and guides to help.
Maybe you’re targeting people that you think make up your audience, but really the people interested in what you’re offering are a completely different audience. If you’re marketing retirement homes on social media, you’ll need to aim at children and grandchildren of retirees, not the actual retirees themselves.
It could be that you are posting inconsistently and/or at the wrong times of the day. Users generally check Twitter in the morning and lunch while Facebook is hopping in the afternoon. If your content is going up at 10 p.m., it is not gaining as much awareness as it could… unless your target audience is third shift workers.
Post Launch Can Help
There you have it. All you have to do is add up all your followers (hope it’s similar to the number of people actually seeing your content), keep up with all retweets, comments, shares, and replies, check website traffic referral sources, figure out who your actual audience is, figure out what they want to see, and post interesting content at the right times on the right days. Simple!
Okay, we know it isn’t actually simple. Because we do it all day—every day.
Let the nerds around here take over your social media marketing, and we’ll do the adding, checking, figuring, and posting for you. Come have a meeting with us to get to know what we can do for your company.
