With so many more people at home and looking for ways to be engaged (constantly), this can be a “glass half full” moment for your company to review and adjust social media strategies by understanding the numbers and feedback received from your consumer base. Some helpful tactics and measurements are listed below for your team to consider.

What is social media?

Let’s start with a refresher – social media is an interactive digital technology that allows for virtual communication and collaboration between users and networks.

For businesses, social media is a marketing instrument of how businesses can attract, engage, and convert their consumers on a consistent and swift basis.

How to measure success on social media

Data is extremely important as it helps influence educated decision-making on all levels of your company and social media metrics is no exception. There are going to be two sets of data that will guide your marketing team in the social media strategy:

Qualitative – this data is collected on a post to post (or campaign to campaign) basis. Types of comments and content within those comments are collected to be evaluated on the tone, audience experiences, and perception of your companies’ overall message.

This can be taxing to your team to collect, but undeniably valuable as social media is based upon interaction with friends, family, and making new connections over the world.

Quantitative – This type of data will help specify the peaks and valleys of when your audience engages, which can determine if specific times of the day your audience is more active or if certain external social issues played a role in activity. This data that is collected that has actual metrics associated, which will help guide strategy:

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators):

• Numbers of followers or subscribers to your company’s page on the chosen social media platforms
• Numbers of Likes, Comments, Retweets, Shares of individual posts to understand full campaigns
• Organic mentions – which include @mention or tagging your company in a story without prompt
• Impressions – how many times a post shows up in a user’s timeline
• Reach – the potential unique viewers of what a post could have
• Response rate and time – how long it takes and often your team is monitoring and responding to your audience. This can help evaluate your customer service if that is something that is lacking.
• Click-through rates (CTR) of each post umbrella’d under each platform. CTR will be important as it will indicate the percentage of audience that showed indication of completing the desired action of the message (“Learn More”, “Shop Now”, “Give Now”, etc.).
• Referrals – in your reports you can see this as the source of where the user came from (clicked-through).
• Conversions – number of completed desired outcomes from your posts, whether it is subscribing, making a purchase, etc.

When looking at your CTR, referrals and conversions you will want to attach a tracked link that will show the users journey from viewing the social media post through conversion. Unique codes or vanity URLs are examples how data can be accurately collected to understand user behavior, determine benchmarks on what success looks like for your brand and help calculate return on investment (ROI).

Note that the overall social media ROI will be calculated by the combination of all quantitative actions from social media that have created value for your company, conversions and time and money spent on campaigns.

Tools that measure social media metrics

Great! We have what you need to measure, now what tools are available to help collect the data for ease and effective reporting.

Social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) – have their own analytics or insight tool that help report on posts within the platform. However, business accounts may be needed to see the full breath of data available.

Google Analytics is a great tool and widely used tool that company’s use to view the customer’s full journey across multiple channels and platforms.

Budgets can be tight, but the need for data is a constant. Here are some great free options that can help introduce your team to analytics before fully investing in a robust software.

Another great list of additional software that varies in price based upon need can be found here.

How to maximize your social media metrics through specific tactics

To achieve higher levels of performance and amount of met goals through social media, your team can use the following key action items on how to engage your audience to meet specific outcomes, which can be incorporated throughout every social media campaign.

Presence: How many social media platforms is your brand on? Increasing the number will help your brand’s visibility.

Reach: Your company must be active to increase number of followers and subscribers to increase the reach of your consumer base.

Engage: Quality, targeted messages to your audience that highlight the importance of your audience as value-added to the brand. This can be shown through the number of likes, comments, and shares on posts.

Scope: Social media posts and messaging must be aligned with overall marketing and communication strategies across the company to create a cohesive, but targeted message based upon internal team needs. Creating a social media calendar that reflects the higher level marketing strategy, with outlining how each campaign and department will utilize social media in reaching goals.

Influence: By influencing actions of an audience, your company will increase its’ credibility on being the expert on specific topics, issues, and products.

What are the next steps?

Over time, your company will gather important data that indicates the content your audience wants to engage with to ultimately convert the action your posts persuades them to complete. This incredibly useful information will help guide new strategy of how your company can grow and what direction the brand should take in future campaigns.

At Colleen Eakins Design, we can help you create effective social media posts your brand needs to connect to your consumers.