If you want your company to reach as many potential customers as possible, you need to maintain a presence on one or more social media platforms. Social media is a great way to interact with your current customers and advertise to new ones through social media campaigns.
But how can you measure the success of social media campaigns? Furthermore, what should you measure? Let’s start at the beginning.
What is a Social Media Metric?
Social media metrics are data points that measure the impact of social media activity on your company’s revenue and help you determine whether you’re achieving your social media goals with your current strategies.
Some examples of common social media metrics include:
- Follower count on a single platform like Instagram.
- Number of impressions, or people who have viewed a single post.
- Click-through rate if your post includes a URL.
Why it’s Important to Track Social Media Metrics
It is essential to track social media events using a behavioral analytics tool like Kissmetrics so that your marketing team can measure the success of their campaigns, how their strategies perform, and the overall impact of social media on your business.
The Success of a Campaign
If the success of an individual campaign is the primary focus, it can be measured in a variety of ways. You can compare the content of one campaign versus another through an A/B test. You can analyze which social media platforms perform best with your target audience.
You can also generate individual URLs for each campaign and track which people are clicking through to reach your website’s landing page.
From there, analytic tools like Kissmetrics can chart the user’s journey through your website and conversion rates, keeping all of your data in one place.
Social Strategy Performance
Knowing how to portray your company across social media is crucial if your campaigns are to succeed. Even a well-crafted campaign on the right platform can fail if it doesn’t match your company’s social strategy.
For example, if your company comes across as earnest and kind, a campaign that focuses on smearing a competitor is unlikely to appeal to your existing customer base.
Impact on Overall Business
Higher-level executives may be wary of increasing the marketing budget, but if the team shows that they have significantly impacted sales, they’re more likely to be given greater access to necessary resources. So if your marketing team can present demonstrable results from their campaigns, it will be easier for them to create and promote the next one.
Steps for Measuring Success of Social Media Campaigns
Measuring the success of social media campaigns doesn’t have to be tricky. By utilizing an analytics tool like Kissmetrics, you can compile many different data points into a single report so that you can draw meaningful insights from the information coming in.
The following steps show how to measure your campaign’s success.
Set Goals
Depending on historical performance, your marketing strategies and the current size of your user or customer base, you should work with your marketing team to create realistic goals.
Your goals could include increasing the number of followers on a platform, achieving a higher click-through rate on your individual posts, or promoting the posts so that more people see your company profile.
Create Metrics for Measuring Goals
Once you have decided which goals you want to focus on, you’ll need to select the metrics that measure how effective your campaign is at achieving those goals.
Monitor and Report
As the campaign proceeds, you should gather daily, weekly, or monthly reports that compile the data from your social media metrics and compare that data against your targets. If you find that you’ve fallen short during one timeframe, you should consider why users aren’t engaging and what improvements you can make.
Optimize
As you continue to monitor your campaign, you might find that certain aspects could stand improvement. Luckily, it’s quite easy to create a new post and give it a separate URL so that you can track how much impact your changes had on your overall campaign.
What to Measure
Knowing what to measure in your social media campaigns is the first part of deciding which KPIs to monitor.
The following metrics are often the most important.
Engagement
Measuring engagement means looking to see how many people liked, shared, or commented on your social media post. Generally, when you create a post, the only people who will see it are your followers.
While this is a great way to interact with existing users or customers, the only way to expand your user and customer base is for followers to share your post with their followers or to pay the platform to promote your post.
Impressions or Reach
Reach is essential for attracting new people. Ideally, your post’s reach far exceeds your follower count so that potential customers will become aware of your company and what you offer.
ROI
Depending on how much you’ve invested in the current campaign, you’ll want to calculate your return on investment (ROI) by measuring how much revenue you can tie to the campaign.
Widespread campaigns with lots of interaction may not be profitable at the end of the day so you’ll want to know how to budget and optimize future campaigns.
Response Rate and Time
Response rate measures how quickly or often your company responds to users and increases interaction. When people expect your account to respond, they’re more likely to comment or ask questions on your posts.
Just ensure that your team responds in a friendly and timely manner.
What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)?
Any demonstrable means of assessing an item, service, client, employee, or company is referred to as a KPI. KPI’s have the following attributes:
- They Are Key Indicators of Progress Towards the End Goal – The real-time data provided by KPIs lets you observe how the campaign is performing and how long it takes you to reach specified goals.
- They Focus on Strategic and Operational Improvement – By tracking your chosen KPIs, you can quantifiably measure where you need to improve so that you and your teams can plan strategies to address those issues.
- They Provide Analytical Basis for Decision Making – Decision-making should always be based on analytical data, instead of gut feelings. Seeing exactly how your campaign is performing is a much better indicator than just asking your marketing team how they feel about it.
What are 5 Key Performance Indicators
The following KPIs provide relevant insights into how your business is progressing towards your goals.
Revenue Per Customer
This is a simple and straightforward KPI to track. By dividing the total revenue per year by the number of customers enrolled, you get to the annual revenue per customer. This gives you a rough estimate of how much individual customers add to your revenue and can help you calculate how much you should be spending on customer acquisition costs (CAC).
Average Class Attendance
For companies that offer fitness, education or other classes as a product, average class attendance is a good way to measure how many users are actually tuning into the classes their subscription is paid for. Full classes are likely to be the profitable ones as well as the result of a good instructor or course content.
Retention Rate
Retention rate measures the percentage of customers who continue to use your products or services or maintain their subscription during a given timeframe.
Profit Margin
Your company’s profit margin during a campaign is usually one of the most important metrics. It is measured by adding up the total revenue attributed to the campaign and subtracting the costs involved in creating and promoting the content.
Average Daily Attendance
Average daily attendance measures how many people utilize your product or service each day.
Conclusion
When you spend time and effort planning a social media campaign, you want to monitor it throughout its entire lifecycle to ensure that it not only engages current and potential customers but that it also brings in revenue. Otherwise, it wasn’t successful. By measuring the right aspects of your campaign, you can optimize future efforts to promote your company and achieve your goals.
Visit Kissmetrics for more information about tracking social media campaigns and measuring their success.
Sources:
What is a KPI? Definition, Best-Practices, and Examples | Klipfolio
All of The Social Media Metrics that Matter | Sprout Social
The 7 Most Important Social Media Marketing Metrics | Keyhole.co
