Unlike other types of online advertisement, often there is no direct way to see how successful your social media efforts had been. Many marketers and social media specialists spend hours, days and even weeks trying to optimize specific content and use all kind of tricks and strategies to make a campaign more social, yet they can’t point to the increase in sales or boost in earnings after the campaign had finished. So does that mean they fail in their efforts? Fortunately, monetary performance is not the only factor that can be used to measure the success of social media efforts, there are many other metrics that can be used to see how successfully your campaign was implemented.
So how do you measure success of your social media efforts other than financial performance?
1. Amount of traffic. In order to have a successful social media campaign you must attract users. Web traffic is a sure way to show that others have seen and read your content, This is a great indicator especially if the majority of traffic came from social media sites.
2. Interaction and engagement by users and followers. This can include sharing of content, clicking on a story, emailing the post to their friend, or reposting it on their Facebook timeline or retweeting it on Twitter.
3. Comments and replies. When people actively engage with the story, they usually leave comments and replies. Discussion of topic or a brand is a good sign your campaign is making people talk about it and it’s definitely being noticed.
4. Number of opt-ins. Every story, post or landing page, should not only have easy sharing options but also have a clear direct call to action. Something simple, direct and easy for user to say yes to. Email asking users to sign up for juicy insider tips, or link to a landing page to receive a free e-book, or even a chance to enter a contest to win a free prize, anything that might entice people to sign up and hopefully increase user loyalty later down the road.
5. Social Media Mentions. Is easy to see if your campaign is making waves and is being paid attention to. Simply do a search on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook for keywords your campaign uses and see how often they’re being mentioned. If you see a stream of tweets and conversations related to nature of your campaign you’re probably on the right track and others are noticing your hard work, but if you do a search and it comes back blank, maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board and try something else.
6. Analytics. Finally make sure you have analytics account set up so you can monitor who your users are and what sites they came from. It sounds fairly obvious, but if you spend your efforts mostly trying to attract Facebook users and your traffic is coming from Twitter, then you need to reevaluate your strategy and analytics is a good way to see exactly what is what.
So next time you’re evaluating the progress of your social media campaign, remember just because you failed to make a pile of dough, it doesn’t mean your social media efforts were in vain.
Have something to add? Use comments form below to let us know how you measure your social media success.
