How to Measure the Success of Your Social Media Marketing Efforts

All brands need a social media presence. Your target market is on every social media platform 24/7. A recent study found out that we open our phones 96 times every day! That’s roughly checking social media once every 10 to 12 minutes. And by golly, at that rate, you can be sure having social media presence will all be worth it.

Your presence ensures engagement with your target audience. But to get to this point where your brand gets to interact with active social media users, you have to implement a social media marketing plan that will help you fulfill the social media goals you have on social networks.

Favorable results do not happen overnight. To obtain viral social media marketing statistics, you should devise and implement a social media strategy that enables you to track the effectiveness of your efforts.

This strategy will be your guide in your brand’s journey to obtain useful engagement. This short and informative article attempts to imbue the reader with a simple, holistic, winning strategy that is easy to start, maintain, and get great results with.

Read on and be enlightened about the challenging yet rewarding world of tracking the success of social media marketing.

Table of Contents

Why Track Your Marketing Efforts Performance?

Tracking your marketing efforts on social media does a lot for your brand. Most importantly, it keeps you on top of things. Social media is a very fast-paced world, and having a sense of control over your efforts is very important.

It is very easy to get overwhelmed with the myriad of things you must do daily. Having the ability to track all your results is the only way to have a secure footing of where you are and where you are going with your social media marketing efforts.

Tracking your efforts tell you what actions worked and didn’t work. Throughout the implementation of your social media marketing strategy, you will get to employ several actions that may boost or decrease your engagement and popularity on social media. Keeping tabs on these actions will allow you to handpick and replicate actions that give you favorable results.

Set KPIs for Your Social Media

KPIs or key performance indicators is just a fancy term used for how many results your social media campaigns get. We here would group key performance indicators into two categories. These are Social Media Platform Results and Real Life Results.

This section discusses exactly that. Let us discuss the two kinds of KPIs:

A. Social Media Platform Results

Social media channel engagements come in the form of likes, views, shares, comments, follows, impressions, and other engagements. These you get directly from users and followers interacting with your posts and ads on social media.

Follows – How many users do your social media accounts have?
Engagements – How many comments, likes, and shares do your posts get?
Impressions – Do your posts or ads appear frequently on people’s feeds?
Reach- Do your posts get to be viewed by a lot of people?

B. Real-Life Results

The second type of KPIs, which we call real-life results, are the things you achieve. These are results that are leads or actual sales for your brand. These kinds of KPIs come in the form of conversions or sales, leads, and contacts that could eventually become sales conversions.

Conversions – Do you get sales or get actual monetary exchange because of your social media campaigns?
Website Traffic – Do your social media funnel traffic to your brand’s website?
Leads – Do potential customers contact your brand due to your social media campaigns?
Contacts – Do you get new people to contact to follow up on new sales deals?

So, how do you exactly track your brand’s social media marketing performance? Every KPI should have its own goal, a way to measure and deem its success. Furthermore, you should have a reliable data source that you can measure frequently.

A goal for every KPI – Set a time-based goal for every kind of KPI. Make these goals challenging but also realistic. An example would be hitting 100k followers within half a year.

A reliable data source for every KPI – Have a defined data source for every KPI for consistency. This will ensure a reliable and consistent way to see your campaign’s performance is doing. All popular platforms come with metrics that are a reliable source of measurable data.

A reliable measure for every KPI – Have a real measure for each KPI that is traceable and quantifiable. Set a standard for each KPI. Having your brand perform at par with the standards you set will ensure that your social media campaigns are performing well.

Measure KPIs frequently – Set a regular schedule by which you measure your KPIs. This schedule will ensure that your campaigns perform at maximum efficiency all the time.

Define Your Goals

You launch campaigns and strategies for social media marketing to achieve something. Define this in terms of specific goals. Make these goals time-bound and set a deadline that will motivate you to achieve them.

Monitor Your Campaign Regularly

Whatever social media marketing types you subscribe to will require consistent attention from you. Only through constant maintenance will your campaign achieve favorable results.

Small business owners do their social media management themselves. Bigger brands hire social media managers for their campaigns. This is a more efficient but capital-intensive way to maintain a relevant social presence.

There is no substitute for consistency. Success lies in how you can adjust to the everyday demands of your campaigns.

What Metrics Should You Track?

If you were to have a social media marketing checklist, make sure to include a concise list of metrics. There will always be innumerable things to measure but keep a short checklist of metrics to keep the job of maintaining a social media campaign simple and much more doable.

If you were allowed to track only three metrics, make sure you include these most essential ones:

Follower counts – These are also synonymous with subscribers. A high follower count means that your social media accounts’ posts have the potential to have views, impressions, views, and engagements. This is due to how many people have your posts ready to be viewed on their social media feeds.
Impressions – The number of unique views made by individual user accounts. The more of these impressions you get, the more you know the reach with your target audience is better.
Click-through rates – Click-throughs are what lead to conversion rates, and conversion is the reason your brand is dabbling in social media.

Measurement Tools to Analyze Your Social Media

Aside from platform metrics, you will want to benchmark your achievements against social media accounts that are doing well. Compare your social media performance with accounts that have similar follower counts and see if your campaigns get more or less the same engagement and impressions.

You can also take note of accounts that perform well above what your campaign achieves. Aspire for the numbers they attain and formulate plans on how to get to their levels of success.

Extra Tips to Track Your Social Media Success

Follow trends – Piggybacking off trends is the easiest way to get in on the latest and most viral things on the internet. Do trends in your style, though, as you would not want to be seen as unoriginal.
Innovate – Try starting trends every once in a while. This will be a trial and error process, so don’t be afraid to throw things until something sticks.
Consistency is key – Execute all your plans on a daily schedule. The world of social media is very fast-paced, and this is the only way your brand will be on top of things to find any level of success.

Social Media Success Is How You Make It

There are few hard and fast rules to follow in achieving social media success. The most creative ideas are often the things that go viral. Of course, these creative ideas should be built upon the good habits we discussed in this article.

Make consistency of the tracking metrics the foundation of your campaigns and you will eventually learn the way to success on social media.