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
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.