4 Steps to Measure Your Social Media Campaign

Maybe you’ve heard it in official conferences before. You’ve probably read about it in many other articles about social media marketing before. The only thing missing is you going deaf from all the pieces of advice telling you to measure your social media campaign.

But as much as you’re probably sick of hearing it, you can’t deny that they’re correct, right? I mean, are there other ways by which you can demonstrate the effect of your activities on your social media channels and into future prospective clients?

Although, here’s the thing. To measure your social media campaign takes some very tricky tasks. In fact, according to many social media marketing experts, your first hurdle lies in social media’s commonplace behavior itself — because it constantly changes. And the next hurdle you’ll be facing involves you trying to figure out the kinds of data that you should monitor and how you would apply them accordingly.

Good news though!

Contrary to what you choose to believe in the beginning, measuring the results and the effectivity of your social media campaign is pretty measurable.

But before we dive in, we’re going to have to strap down a right attitude, and the most beginner-level of perception of analyzing social media statistics. Perhaps you can even enlist the help of a couple of competent tools for social media listening and managing.

Why should you measure your social media campaign?

Why it is very vital to measure each of your campaigns? Why it is considered an integral part of the success of the brand of your business? Why do we need to consider this on your online marketing?

Did you know that in measuring each of your social media campaigns, you will know how successful your brand online? It can also tell which specific areas contribute to the success of your marketing campaign. It can also tell which one works as the least and needs improvement.

Measuring your social media campaign can be a broad topic, you might wonder what are the right elements to measure. This is actually a huge question in each of the advertisers. It is enough if you get the most of the traffic out from your social media campaign? What is truly the analytics to keep an eye on? Does it deal with the reactions, the comments or engagement?

Remember that this is vital to know since you will uncover how interesting social media advertising works?

It is also a must to know if you want to see, what type of post your audience is interested in and what they want about your brand. And most importantly, it’s a must for every client to know the status of each campaign that they have invested, after all, each company that is focused primarily on managing social media needs to deliver the results that they have promise.

How come it’s still so difficult?

As social media campaign became more interesting to use we can experience right now that measuring a campaign is not an easy task. You will that there are various metrics to consider. Although these metrics are available, why it is still difficult to measure.

You are not alone in wondering about it. What it makes this platform exciting is that it is very tough to measure. This happens because of the fact that there are lots of updates, latest features, algorithm changes, and a lot more policies. This only implies that with the changes that are currently happening, we can see that some of your strategies might not be valid for the next month.

With that event, measuring the brand’s performance over the social media network is so powerful. This is not just about justifying your social media advertising budget to clients or the administration department, but this is very vital for the future campaign. You need to collect these data for the next campaign and remember, if you have an ongoing campaign, this is an essential thing to do.

Monitoring these campaign continuously will reveal a couple of seasonal changes. This is the best data you need. This is also vital in working out for the changes in your strategies.

Another amusing aspect of the social media campaign is that those data that are easily counted i.e. likes, followers, hearts, tweets, retweets, and etc or the visible data does not provide much insight in measuring your return on investment or ROI.

Some of the metrics are trackable but some are hidden, it needs special tools in order to be uncovered. These hidden metrics are needed to be calculated to measure the overall success of your social media campaign.

How to Measure Your Social Media Campaign

As said in the above, to measure a social media campaign is not an easy task, yet this is not impossible. What’s the key in tackling your complex problem then? All we need to do segment them both into smaller sections and use a methodical approach.

In measuring your campaign, you need to deal with two kinds of analytics: the ongoing analytics and campaign metrics.

Dealing with ongoing analytics work on measuring the daily activities over a time period to spot seasonality changes and big movements over the rate of interaction.

Then when it comes to campaign metrics, this relates to measuring the contributions of each specific campaign that you are working out with.

With the identified metrics, let us learn how to measure your social media campaign. Using a methodical approach, I will share to you the four steps you can use in measuring the impact of your campaign that will clearly show your returns on investment (ROI).

Step 1: Set the goals & determine objectives

Every marketing campaign always starts out with goal setting and creating clear-cut objectives. If you don’t start out every campaign with thoughts like these, you might be in the losing end.

This start with asking yourself or your team, what are you working towards for this campaign? What type of audience are you going to target? Do you want just to raise your brand’s popularity, or you want to include traffic and conversions?

So let’s get one thing straight.

On this step, you need to have a SMART goal.

• Specific social media platform to work on
• Measurable metrics to track
• Actionable goals, wherein this is attainable
• Relevant metrics to deal with
• Time-bound which deals with setting goals for a specific time period

Step 2: Choosing your criterion

At this step, you need to choose the correct statistics that are to be measured, with this you can learn the growth and the status of your social media campaign.

Considering these metrics you will know how many users you can reach and is talking about your
brand. These specific metrics are truly vital to measure to see the real picture of the campaign. This is not just about dealing with visible data but it deals with the relevant metrics that impact your overall success.

These metrics include the following:

Mentions’ Volume

This refers to the overall mentions of your brands or the mentions that contain a specific keyword relating to your business. Let’s say that for instance, you run both Twitter or Instagram accounts, you can measure the mentions using the hashtags in public posts.

This will simply shows how many users you have reached over a specific period of time. It is ideal also to measure this type of metric either weekly or monthly basis. This will truly show the trend of your brand’s mentions.

Be observant when it comes to the strategies you have applied and how they affect your trends over time. If you have seen that your new strategy is not working, you need to work on some changes. You need to see positive changes in order that these strategies will continue to be applied.

Voice Share

This refers to the percentage of conversation that talks about your brand. It deals with how much are talking about your brand than your competitors.

Using this metric can help you understand the reason why they are talking about your brand and know why some of your target markets are not engaging with your brand. This is truly vital in telling what improvements you need to apply.

In finding this voice share, you simply get the quotient of the total number of brand mentions over the total competitor’s brand mentions.

Measuring the Sentiment

It is not enough to measure the number voice share, you need to check also the number of sentiments. Discover the comments about your brand. Some of these comments are negative, and this is vital to find out how you can address and improve your product or service. With this, you are able to find out the level of satisfaction of users over your brand.

Simply, this answers if who are satisfied or dissatisfied. Therefore there is still a need to manually find about the brand sentiments.

Make sure to spend some time reading the comments about your brand. There are various types of sentiments but do not worry when you come across negative comments. This only implies an opportunity. It signals how you can improve either your product or service.

Assessing Engagement

One of our goal in a social media campaign is to create engagement. And among the metrics that need to be measure is engagement. We want to know how much is getting connected with the brand. How much are joining the discussions you have started.

This is not just about mentions, but deals on how people leave comments or interact with you. Identifying if a campaign has low engagement features another opportunity to work out. You need a strategy that can improve your engagement rate, after all, your ultimate goal is making your followers or fans pledge their loyalty to your brand, wherein they voluntarily give reviews and positive comments.

Increasing followers/fans

One of the visible data that can be measure over social media pages is the increase of followers or fans. You have to make sure that the added increase in followers and fans provide relevancy. It must have a specific target market.

Not all times having an increase in followers or fans can be equated with an increase in awareness, some of these might not be within your target market. These metrics must be combined with other metrics in order to show if there is a success over a social media campaign.

And if you are not seeing an increase over your followers and fans, this is also an opportunity. It also implies that you need improvement on your strategy. You must analyze each type of your strategy, i.e. does adding an awesome image contribute to the increase of fans or followers.

This metrics helps you identify if you need to redesign your strategies and reevaluate your campaign. This also implies that being successful in social media is not about the numbers of followers or fans, it’s about the quality of users that you gain. For example, it doesn’t matter if your accounts have millions of followers. And if none of them are engaging, it only means that you need to improve in your strategies.

CTR Into Landing Pages

A part of many companies’ goals for every social media campaign is delivering link juice and organic traffic to a specific target page or also known as the website’s landing page. And advertising or promoting your landing page over a social media campaign involves adding the website’s page target link.

And this is the metric that we wanted to measure. It involves measuring the click-through rate of your landing pages or counting how many did click the link within your organic and sponsored posts. You can have Google analytics and social media analytics tool to measure it.

This is also a must to measure, especially if you are launching competitions or featuring a new product or other services.

Platform Reach

This deals with measuring your brand’s presence strength over various social media sites. It aims to measure social mentions in leading social networks platforms.

On this note we can also see that not all platforms can deliver you the right target, i.e. Snapchat is popular on the younger generation or Pinterest which are very popular on the female audience.

Discovering the data within these metrics, help you also on how to deal with your platform reach. You must have a strategy that is ideal for your target audience.

Mentions on Mobile Devices

As we can observe the increasing use of mobile devices allows you to see if your campaign is on the right trend. It can answer if you need to focus on working with mobile device campaign.

If the data tells that you have more mentions over the mobile devices, it only shows that you are reaching the right audience.

Returns on Effort

This will measure if all the strategies being applied is relevant and can provide positive returns. You need to analyze if the current campaign is working or not based on the value.

It also answers if you are addressing the opportunities over lower brand mentions.

Step 3: Measure your social media campaign

After getting familiar with the metrics, this is now time to work out on the measurement of each social media campaign. You need to gather the metrics mentioned above, with this you can determine how you can improve your strategies.

When it comes to delivering a social media report, all you need to is to work out on your graphs or charts.

It is truly ideal if you can measure the metrics and see if there are spikes when it comes to your brand conversions.

Step 4: Adapt accordingly and repeat

When you are done with the three steps, you need to fully understand the data being delivered. At this stage, you have the chance to know the status of your brand’s success.

At this step, you are going to analyze all the data that is coming from the metrics. You must analyze it carefully and understand it fully. In this way, it’s easy to track if there is a significant impact on your campaign.

The Conclusion

Measuring your social media campaign is very vital. As mentioned above it’s evident that by measuring your campaign, it helps you see the opportunities that your brands needed to achieve. Make sure also that in order to have a worthy campaign, the metrics must show an increasing result in terms of conversion and sales.

Although we can see that it is hard to measure those metrics, having its data is powerful. There are lots of things that need to be considered and remember that in measuring, you truly need to have patience and allot time on it.

Are you using the same metrics mentioned above? Are you gaining an increase in numbers?

Those data are truly powerful in addressing the need for improvement over the whole campaign. Therefore, there is a need to checked manually and look on the specific area that needs improvement.

Evaluating the outcomes is a must. It must be considered as your top priority activity. You must have a strategic approach for this.