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Social media is a great place to advertise your business, but it can be difficult to know if you’re doing the right things in order to get the best results.
It’s important for small business owners to measure their social media campaigns so they can evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. Regularly and effectively analysing the results of your marketing allows you to continually improve performance on future projects. This is especially important in social media marketing, in which trends constantly change.
What is a social media campaign?
Social media marketing consists of any marketing efforts made via social media platforms (such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) in order to benefit a business. A social media campaign is a planned and connected series of social media content based around one goal, and targeted to one specific audience. Like any marketing campaign, measuring social media campaigns is necessary to ensure goals were met, learn about the business’s audience, and improve future content.
Here are six steps for measuring and evaluating social media campaigns:
1. Establishing an overall goal for your campaign
You might be surprised to find that some of these steps start before your campaign is even planned. This is because to accurately measure results, you have to be clear on what you’re starting with, and what you want to achieve. At the end of the campaign, you can then ask: Did the campaign meet the goal, or not? Why?
First, you have to define what success looks like to you. For example, if you want more people to engage with your company through social media, your goal could be to “increase interactions by 25%”.
Other goals might be:
- Increase web traffic
- Increase sales
- Gain email subscribers
- Increase brand trust
- Get people interested in a specific product
- Get ticket sales to an event
You may need to do some research into the needs of your brand to see which goal/s you’ll choose for your campaign. If your only goal is ‘to advertise the business’, that’s far too broad and likely won’t get the specific results and data you want. What does your business need right now, and what can help you get there?
2. Researching and planning your campaign
Now you can begin using your goals to decide on the who, what, when, where, why and how of your social media campaign.
First, determine the main factors your campaign will be based around:
- Your business/offering
- Target audience
- Competition
- Budget
- Goals
Once these are clear, you can determine the more specific factors of your campaign:
- Which social media platforms will you use?
- How many posts will you use?
- What types of posts will you use?
- Images
- Captions
- Hashtags
- Stories
- Videos
- Etc.
- When will you post?
- What will be the duration of the campaign?
- How much time will you spend creating the campaign?
- How much money will you spend on boosting posts, if any?
Break down each task into smaller chunks and assign deadlines for each task listed in order, to ensure that everything is done correctly and on time for the campaign’s goals to be met.
3. Finding a baseline to measure the success of your social media campaign
Now you have the goals you want to reach, and a plan of how to reach them, you finalise the baselines that will decide whether or not your results can be considered a success. Your baselines need to allow you to answer relevant questions (and therefore get relevant data) at the end of the campaign. For example:
- Did you reach your goal (i.e. gain a specific # of followers)?
- Were you under or over the goal significantly?
- Which platforms performed best?
- What caused you to reach/exceed your goal, or what caused your campaign to underperform?
- Was it worth the money and time spent?
Creating a clear timeline of your campaign from the research phase to the end will help with this. This will allow you to make better notes along the way, and you’ll be safer to make changes to the campaign as you go if you find something isn’t working.
Now you’re ready to start running your campaign and tracking its success!
4. Analysing the effectiveness of individual posts
There are two ways to measure the success of individual posts and social media ads: analysing the engagement rate (likes, comments, shares) and analysing your insights/analytics (statistics created by the platform).
You’ll quickly realise that some types of posts, and some platforms, outperform others. For example: Your images on Facebook are doing well, but images on Twitter aren’t. But where Twitter gets lots of shares for links, Facebook doesn’t. Maybe Instagram isn’t doing well at all. This will be different for every campaign, business and target audience!
Use your engagement rate to see how many interactions your posts received throughout the campaign. Comments and shares are more powerful than likes, so look for the posts with the highest amount of these in particular. Answer these questions: What did people like about the post, and which types of posts received the most likes/reactions? What were the comments about? What did the audience find shareable?
Use insights/analytics to see who your audience is. Impressions and reach are valuable in seeing how many people have viewed your posts (which you can compare to the amount of engagement). Analysing your audience is also vital. This will allow you to see who is interested in your posts – their age, gender and location – as well as information about them such as when they’re online. If you’re reaching your business’s target audience, that’s perfect. But if you’re finding your interactions are coming from elsewhere (and they’re people who likely won’t turn into customers), you may need to look into different targeting methods.
5. Using website analytics to see how people from social media are interacting with your website
If your goal consists of getting social media users back to your website (whether it’s to learn more about you, make a sale, sign up to your newsletter, or anything else!), you should use your website data to see which platforms got the most people to click.
You can also see the dates for your website clicks, based on each page and platform, to figure out which posts were the ones that performed best.
- Which posts were clicked on most?
- Can you determine common factors between these posts (that can be replicated)?
- How long did people spend on your website?
- Did clickers turn into customers?
6. Using data to make decisions about future content creation
Congratulations, the campaign is over and was, hopefully, a success! Even if you didn’t meet your goals, you definitely learned some things about what does and doesn’t work in social media campaigns for your business and target audience. You can now use this information to make better content and campaigns going forward.
- Which social media platforms worked best? How can you utilise these more going forward?
- Which social media platforms did not perform? Are there steps you can take to make them work better, or is it more worthwhile to focus elsewhere?
- Which types of posts performed best?
- Which types of posts performed worst?
- Did you receive any helpful audience feedback?
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