Ways To Measure Your Social Media Marketing Success
Management Insight
by Eric Taylor
Do you measure success by the click-throughs and conversions you receive with the best Facebook ads and posts, or do you measure success as a larger, more popular, more trusted brand? That’s something a lot of businesspeople struggle with. Both would be a measure of success. One’s dealing with the bottom line while the other focuses more on brand awareness and potential.
For social media marketing in particular, it’s better to focus more on the latter when you’re measuring success.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t try hard to increase the efficiency of everything you’re doing, from ad campaigns to inducing signups, but social marketing is about increasing your network and making sure that your brand envelops the niche you’re targeting.
Metrics for Proper Measurement
Breadth of Brand Reach
Social media campaigns can be tricky things. You may not be experiencing a lot of conversions through sales at the moment, but that doesn’t mean your campaign isn’t successful. It’s important to measure the total reach of your brand. How much of your intended market are you covering? How far does your particular network extend? A larger reach equates to a successful campaign. It’s potential here that you’re gauging.
Increase in Contacts and Conversions
Why are contacts included here instead of only conversions? It’s because your particular version of a conversion funnel may have little to do with social media, or it may rely strictly on social media. The important factor to focus on here is whether or not your contacts are growing. Are you receiving a lot of opt-ins via your social marketing? Focus on individuals who are joining based on social marketing measures and see which of your actual conversions followed along social lines to get there.
Rate of Amplification
It’s a somewhat fancy name for a very simplistic metric. The amplification rate is the rate by which your secondary networks are growing, and this growth is spurred by individuals who are sharing your content amongst themselves and throughout their entire social network. Pay attention to the number of shares you’re receiving on Facebook, Google+, and other locations where this metric is available. A lot of shares can equate to a successful campaign.
Content Acceptance
Another strong way to gauge your success is to check the acceptance of your content. Of course, having a lot of “likes” does matter for something here. It’s showing that your content is approved of by fans. But don’t rest on this one factor. Also pay attention to who’s talking about your content and what they’re saying about it. Focus on unique page views, the time people spend on your page, and the overall metrics of your pages when you release new content.
In this layman’s version of social media success measuring, you were spared the mundane, headache-inducing numbers and were given a simple way to judge whether or not you are experiencing marketing success. Whether you crunch numbers for hours to deduce something or take a shortcut, you’re reaching the same result. You can always check detailed analytics to figure out different ways to make a campaign even more successful, but measuring whether or not it’s doing well is rather easy.
Eric Taylor is a business developer and a freelance writer for the Facebook ad campaign tool Qwaya.
Ringio is happy to have Eric as a guest writer.
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