We believe everyone should use social media for their business, but how do you track performance?
One of the most effective ways to raise your company’s online profile and attract a larger audience is through social media marketing.
You should be using social media sites as part of your digital marketing strategy if you aren’t already. There are 3.8 billion social media users globally as of January 2020, making it a no-brainer for businesses to leverage these platforms to deliver their content in front of a larger audience.
While having a strong social media presence is important, due to frequent changes in social media algorithms, businesses must now start investing money in their social media accounts.
Organic posts alone won’t get you the results you’re hoping for if you’re an internet business wanting to prosper. When you invest time developing outstanding content, you naturally want people to see it, but without sponsored social, your reach is limited.
Boosted posts, sponsored advertisements, and action-based campaigns are all excellent ways to get your page and posts in front of the right people at the right time.
It’s crucial to track the performance of your social media operations, just like any other type of marketing. You must keep track of performance and stay up to date with new features and algorithm adjustments in order to assess what is working and what is not.
Key Metrics To Track
Engagement
Measuring how your audience interacts with your content and social media pages can give you a good idea of how effective your postings are and whether or not they’re entertaining or useful.
There are many distinct types of engagement. Likes, comments, shares, retweets, link clicks, and other metrics all indicate how well your postings are doing.
High engagement rates indicate that you’re reaching the appropriate individuals with the correct material, and they’re useful for determining not only your audience’s interest, but also how many of your followers are real, genuine people.
What are the most important engagement indicators, and what do they mean?
Likes, Comments, Shares – These are all individual engagement indicators that indicate the effectiveness of your content. Users who engage with your postings indicate that they are really interested in what you have to say and, in the case of shares, that they believe it is worthy of being seen by others as well.
Link Clicks – It’s important to keep track of how many people are actually clicking through to read more if your campaign entails sharing links to blogs or pages on your website. This way, you’ll know if you’ve been reaching the correct people with content that piques their interest, and if you should keep posting comparable stuff.
Followers – This is especially crucial if you’ve run a Facebook “page likes” campaign and saw a spike in likes/followers. Later on, we’ll go over follower count in further detail.
Look at the overall engagement rate, which takes all indicators into account and divides by the amount of impressions, to keep track of your campaign’s engagement (people who have seen the posts).
A sudden decline in your engagement rates per post or profile could be a sign that you need to look into your recent content or target demographic.
Follower Growth
Follower Growth is a simple but crucial indicator to measure. Having a constant growth in followers is something that leads many major accounts astray. Assume you manage a Twitter account that has steadily grown to roughly 2000 followers. You’ve had a stable 50 followers per month for the past year, with a consistent engagement rate. Isn’t that appealing? Well, not quite. Many accounts are unaware that as their account increases gradually, their growth rate will decrease. This is something that becomes increasingly significant over time, so it’s crucial to get started tracking as soon as possible.
No. of new followers this month ÷ No. of followers at the start of the month X 100 = Growth Rate
Account Reach
Another crucial indicator to monitor is reach. In contrast to impressions, which is the total number of times your post was seen independent of engagements, reach can be defined as the number of unique people who see your post.
What is the significance of reach? Simply put, the greater your reach, the more people will see your message and be able to interact with it. If the goal of your campaign is to increase your following or spread the news about a new product or service, reach is critical.
Fortunately, reach is one of the easier metrics to track, since most, if not all, major social media networks include a built-in way to see your reach. It’s available in Facebook’s page/business manager and Instagram’s business account analytics tools’ post insights.
Reach can also help you figure out how interesting your posts are. If you see that your postings have a large reach but only a few likes and comments, the content may have gone viral because of the size of your following, but the message it carries has fallen short of expectations.
In contrast, you may discover that one of your posts has a low reach but a high impression rate, indicating that individuals who read it are returning to see it again, indicating that the material was quite successful.
Google Analytics
Some social media strategies will be created and optimised with the goal of driving traffic to a certain website landing page. In last month’s PPC metrics blog, we emphasised the importance of landing page analysis.
Here, social media marketers will be particularly interested in the amount of traffic they have been able to generate. Of course, you can use each platform’s built-in analytics to measure link clicks and other metrics, but using Google Analytics’ traffic sources provides the most powerful and accurate indication of success.
Social Media ROI
ROI is Return On Investment which is something you’ll definitely want to take a look at. To validate any budget effort in and around your social marketing strategy, you must be able to measure social media ROI. It allows you to identify what is working for you and what isn’t; from there, you can effectively move your financial resources around and get the most out of each cost per click.
Calculating Social Media ROI
What ROI means for your social media campaign will be determined largely by the organisations of both the campaign and the company for which you work, as this will dictate what is considered worthwhile.
If you’re selling things on Facebook using social media advertising, for example, you may measure ROI by revenue using a simple formula like:
(Profit / Investment) x 100 = ROI
So if you made £3,000 in revenue from £500 of Facebook Ads promoting your product. Your profit is £2,500,making the calculation
(2500 profit / 500 investment) x 100 = 500% ROI
This is covered in further depth in Hootsuite’s excellent article on the most prevalent ROI formulae.
