5 Ways to Measure the Success of a Social Media Campaign

If you’re running a social media campaign you are probably not doing it for fun – you are most likely looking for results. In most cases, the intended outcome of a social media campaign is to strengthen and increase awareness of your brand. In the past, traditional marketing efforts in this arena were difficult to evaluate due to the complications of determining the link between a campaign and brand awareness. One of the appeals of social media marketing is the fact that, as a digital campaign, it is possible to measure various metrics and so evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign. Use these five methods to measure the success and effectiveness of your social media campaign.

1. Brand Reach & Exposure “Mentions”

Unfortunately, measuring your brand reach or potential viewers of your social media campaign is not quite as rudimental as tracking the total number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers you have. In order to better account for duplicate users you should focus not on your raw numbers but on your percentage growth rate. Remember to compare like with like by measuring metrics over a defined period of time i.e. monthly or quarterly.

For example, with Twitter your total potential reach over the course of a month is made up of your followers and the followers of those that re-tweet your message. Comparing each of these figures with their previous monthly totals allows you to focus in on growth areas.

• For Facebook tracking you want to record the number of fans you have for your page. In addition, record the number of friends that each user who has:

• 1. Become a fan during the month
  2. Commented on your post during the month and
  3. Liked your post during the month.
• On YouTube: Track your channel’s views, subscriber numbers and your video bounce rates over the month.
• On Your blog: look at the number of visitors to related posts over the month.

Don’t forget to look at metrics that are not directly tied to social media. Website traffic and searches that are related to your brand also indicate increased brand awareness.

Useful Tools: TweetReach, Facebook Insights, Brand Tracker

2. Engagement

By measuring how many users engage and interact with your message you can evaluate the appeal and interest of your marketing efforts. The more engagement you see the more effective and valuable your campaign.

• Facebook – Number of clicks your links received. Number of times your messages were commented on. Number of times your messages were liked.
• Twitter – Number of times your hashtag was included in tweets. Number of retweets. Number of clicks your link received. Total number of Twitter users involved in activity.
• Blog – Number of new subscribers. Amount of sharing of the posts. Amount of comments.
• Youtube – Amount of new subscribers. Amount and type of ratings (positive or negative) Number of comments.

Useful Tools: TweetEffect, also read out blog post titled: “10 Ways to Monitor Your Brand Online”

3. Share of Voice and Sentiment (marketplace competition)

Share of voice is a valuable metric for evaluating your brand’s penetration in comparison to your competitors. However, leaving your analysis at simply finding out where you stand on pure mentions would be a mistake. You also need to qualitatively analyse how your brand is being talked about, thereby finding out what sentiments your base has towards your brand. After all a 75% share of mentions, most of which are positive is a very different beast from a 75% share of mentions, most of which are negative.

Calculating your share of voice requires a bit of data processing. You first need to collect data on the number of times your brand is mentioned over a specific time period. You must also record mentions of your competitors’ brands. You need to assign each mention a category of positive, negative or neutral. Finally you need to weight each of those categories in order to evaluate both your share of voice and the sentiment towards your brand.

Useful Tools: Trackur, Radian6, Social Mention, Google Trends, Google Insights

4. Influence

When you have a high level of influence, you are more likely to inspire your followers to take some kind of action such as engaging with your message or making a purchase.

Metrics you can use to evaluate your influence include:

• The number of links to your message and content.
• How often your twitter messages are retweeted.
• How often your Facebook posts are liked, commented on and shared.
• The influence of your followers and those who engaged with you should also be tracked here.

Useful Tools: PostRank, TwentyFeet, Twylah (a manual check is, however, the best tool here).

5. Finally…Measure Conversions

It might be tempting to jump straight into the measurement of conversions and return on investment. However, without analysing the previous metrics you are missing out on important data that tells you not just what your ROI is, but why it is so.

There are a number of methods of tracking conversions from your social media marketing campaign:

• Track social media traffic to your website in its own category – use segments in Google Analytics.
• Advertise a coupon or deal on social media to properly assign conversions to your campaign, even if the traffic itself does not come from social media.
• Don’t make the mistake of only tracking direct sales or ad-clicks. Time spent on a particular page, viewing of various products and other such actions can also give you valuable data.

With these tools and steps you can better measure the success of your social media campaigns, allowing you to refine, tweak and improve your future efforts.

Photo credits: Muffet via Flickr

About the author: Kunle Campbell

An ecommerce advisor to ambitious, agile online retailers and funded ecommerce startups seeking exponentially sales growth through scalable customer acquisition, retention, conversion optimisation, product/market fit optimisation and customer referrals.

Follow @https://twitter.com/kunletcampbell