5 Ways to measure the success of your social media marketing strategy & campaign

Measuring the performance of your social media marketing activities is one of the most important aspects to understand the effectiveness of the social media efforts. In most cases, the intended outcome of a social media campaign is to strengthen and optimize awareness of the brand. Also, it is to determine if a certain on-going social media campaign of a brand is engaging the consumers to form an interactive session with them, and its effect on the sales to monitor the effectiveness of a social media campaign.

Following are 5 basic indicators of the performance of your social media marketing efforts-

Reach – It gauges the increase of social media interactions. It helps in understanding the background of the content. It is to determine how far the content of the company is circulating and the size of the audience for the message. Reach is a measure of possible audience size.

It is good to have a large audience but it doesn’t tell everything. Reach becomes a powerful instrument when it is compared with other engaging metrics.

Engagement – The basic concept of engagement is to measure the number of audiences participating in the conversation about the brand and the products, and the current strategy to spread the content and engage with the topic. It is through this method of measure that the company can evaluate the appeal and interest of the marketing efforts. The more the engagement of the brand, the more effective and valuable the social media campaign is.

– Facebook – Number of clicks on the links posted. Number of times the messages were commented on. Number of times messages were liked.

–  Twitter – Number of times Hashtags were included by the users in tweets. Number of Retweets and link viewed. Number of twitter users involved in any company’s activity.

–  Blog – Number of new subscribers. Determining the number of shares likes and comments on the blog post.

–  Youtube – Amount of new subscribers. Calculating the number of comments and likes on videos.

Influence –In order to analyze who is talking about the brand and the impact that they have, influence is measured. When the brand has a high level of influence, it is more likely to inspire and engage the users to take actions such as making a purchase. Metrics that can used to evaluate the influence include:

–  Number of links in the messages and content

–  Frequency of twitter messages that are retweeted

–  Frequency of Facebook post liked, commented on and shared

–  Influence of fans, followers and those engaged with the brand also to be tracked.

Share of Voice and Emotions (competition in the marketplace) – It is a valuable metric to understand and evaluate the brand’s penetration in comparison to the competitors. It is not only important to evaluate where the company stands on pure mentions but also needs to be qualitatively analyzed how much the brand is talked about on the social front and the sentiments that the audiences have for the brand. It needs a touch of data processing while calculating the share of voice. The company has to first collect data on the number of times the brand is mentioned over particular time period. According to the mentions, it needs to be categorized in positive, negative or neutral ratio. Lastly, the company has to weight the categories in order to determine the share of voice and sentiments towards the brand.

Sales –Social media measurement is about counting the number of the current activities on media sites. But the thing that really matters is the actions taken as a result of the social media efforts. The impact of social media actions on the sales and purchases is why there is a need to measure the sales. Through that the strategies can be improved with innovative ideas and content.