Marketers are putting a lot of time, money and effort into social media campaigns on sites like Facebook and Twitter. And while these campaigns typically aren't nearly as expensive as conventional advertising, you can still accrue some pretty big costs, especially when juxtaposed against the bottom line. Unfortunately, not every brand out there will operate a successful social campaign. Even some brands with many page likes and followers are putting in far more than they're getting out.
As a marketer, you have to work to measure the success of your social media campaign. Not only do you want to see if it's worth your while, but you also want to see if you can tweak and tighten up any areas to save money and time while still having an impact.
One of the best ways to measure the success of your social campaign is to actually listen for any type of impact you're having. Using a search feature on a site like Twitter, you can actually type in your business' name and see who's talking about it and what they're talking about. You can do similar things on Facebook and other social sites.
Not only can you initially view who's saying what about your brand, but you can also follow people around who follow and speak about you. This allows you to gauge the type of impact you're having with actual people. It's not a metric you may be used to, but it's getting right to the heart of the matter. And that's what the people really think about your brand.
Volume, exposure, reach, amplification, engagement. These are all types of metrics you may want to create as a gauge of how well you're doing. For example, you may decide a good way to measure the success of your current campaign is to measure the engagement of that campaign via the likes, shares, comments, replies, etc. you're receiving. Or, you might want to measure exactly how far your message is spreading when you create an ad, or how many News Feeds you're appearing in.
You can also track URL shares, clicks, conversions and other factors to see how much traffic you're driving to your website. You might also want to look at your competition regularly to see how well you're doing against them in the same niche. These are all different metrics you may want to create as a gauge for your own success. Now it's just about monitoring them.
This tip ties directly in with No. 2. Now you have some metrics you wish to use as a gauge of your social media campaign's effectiveness, you need to monitor and track these results. For ads in particular, you can do this with a good third-party ad-management app for a site like Facebook.
Overall, you can find a lot of great analytics tools out there, whether it's something offered by Google or a social-media-specific tool like SocDir, which captures these stats in real-time and allows you to analyze a wide range of metrics to judge the effectiveness of your campaign. It's up to you to decide what the measure of success is, however.
There are a few ways you can tell if any new customer is purchasing via social media. ROI is the number-one goal of any business. Investing in a social campaign can pay off in multiple ways, as with brand awareness and overall reach, but if you're not actually making money, then can you ever say you're truly successful?
Try this: Offer a Facebook-specific promotion and give out a coupon code. If the leads going through your funnel come out customers on the other side and use that code, then you have a very easy way to tell if what you're doing via social media is actually paying off. The minutia here is just math.
Not every measure of success is as straightforward as No. 4, so you have to remember success is measured in different ways. Your social media campaign might be making an impact and you simply don't realize it. Or, the other way around, you might think you're making an impact due to the bottom line but are actually wasting time and money with your current social campaign. Finding out the truth is always in your best interest.
How do you measure your social media campaigns' effectiveness? Share your insight in the comments!
Photo Credit: Get Your Results
Lori Davis is an online writer for Qwaya, a facebook ad campaign tool. She’s a social media enthusiast who loves to write about social media tips and strategies. Aside from writing, Lori also enjoys engaging with different communities and social forums.
