When various campaigns reside in many social media platforms, it is indeed an important task for a marketer to measure its success. Measuring social media success is essential to check the marketing efforts and the way it pays attention to the bottom line of the business.  For the effective growth of an online business, you must find out ways as to how to measure social media marketing success?

Measuring social media success with regards to ROI is indeed a difficult task for the following reason:

• Some marketers feel that measuring social media success cannot be performed. Like some marketers just display ad campaigns on some social media platforms and just wait for the outcome hoping something good would turn out.
• Many companies tend to make use of social media channels to measure social media success. It examines various metrics like tweets, likes. These metrics are quite tough to monetize. This is because all businesses are mainly concerned with the core of business activities like email subscribers, website visits, sales, calls, etc thereby giving less focus on other factors.

When you measure social media success, consider taking ways to measure advertising channels. In case you make use of PPC advertising, you can access the social media channels concerning cost-per-impression or cost-per-click. 

Many businesses fail with social media success as they don’t how to measure social media success and tends to create an account on many social media channels without having the full picture of the social media channels. Once the account is set on many social media platforms, you would have no idea of what to perform next. When your main goal is to succeed in social media campaigns, you should first find out the channel first. Also, keep track of your goals to match the overall business objectives.

Few of the business objectives that they aim from various social media are the following:

• Increase On The Website Traffic

The most appreciated marketing tool is your website. Hence, focus on getting more traffic to your website to get new customers and generate more sales. When you target to get more traffic to your website, you should have a checkpoint in place to bring in the right traffic to your website. This means to target people who are interested in purchasing your brand. The main key here is content creation. There is a saying that ‘Content is the King of SEO’. When your website has enormous information that your target audience gets, you automatically increase your website traffic. It would eventually enhance your brand awareness.

• Enhance Sales

Online selling has been increasing over the past few years and is the current trend. Most of the customers prefer transparency, conversations, etc. When you show increase customer service, the more interested they would be with your brand.

• Enhance Newsletter Sign-Ups

One important marketing strategy is email marketing. It is an ideal method for lead generation and updates them with the current company happenings and brand information.

• Enhance Customer Service

These days, most people work with various social media platforms, so any complaints from any customer should be dealt with soon.

Let us discuss on How to measure social media marketing success?

1. Bifurcate Social Media Channels

This is a very essential point to measure social media success. Every social media marketer makes an obvious mistake to operate all the social media channels the same way. This would cause account repetition in multiple channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. The requirement for every single social media channel is different and users on each platform prefer customized content on each platform. For example:

• Instagram platform users require watching visual content
• Twitter platform users prefer small content that can be displayed on its timeline
• Facebook platform users prefer a happy-go and friendly content
• LinkedIn platform users prefer business-related content

So, you need to bifurcate your content in such a way that it fits the right channel and meets the social media requirement.  This would cater to the customer’s expectations on every channel.

2. Have An Emotional Touch

Yet another way to measure social media success is its emotional and personal touch. Social media platforms would not perform well. It is operated by an autoboot. Ensure that the interactions with customers on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook carry real and personal. Greet users in the morning, share an update on the workday, share stories that benefit your target audience. In all these actions, your main target is to promote your brand or product. Customers who are active in your social media platform prefer human addresses to their grievances, questions, or appreciation. Hence, provide a feel to your customers, that your social media platforms are guided and operated by an interesting human who cares for them.

3. Client Attention

Your social media strategy should pay attention to convert your followers to your brand ambassadors. If this is not successful, you should verify and work with it again. Your main importance should be customer attention. For a successful social media channel, every single customer concern or comment on whether it is good or bad needs to be addressed and should not be ignored. This is an important point to measure social media success. Hence, make it a habit and train your people to be a first responder. This employee should take care to see that all customer questions are addressed every day. If possible, fix it the same day or if the concerns or questions are complicated, then request time from your customer to solve it. The first responder should maintain a library of customer fixes that he has solved. It would be easy for tracking. You should make it a point to showcase in social media channels that you value your customers and treat them well.

4. Maintain a Proper Analytics

Playing with analytical data might be tough but it is an essential point to measure social media marketing success. Fix up a day per month to pay attention to the data that you get from your social media campaigns and use it to measure social media success. Maintain an eye on the following parameters:

• Number of your posts
• Followers – whether it is increasing or decreasing
• Number of clicks throughs that you get to your websites
• Number of page views
• Your posts like and shares

It is indeed tough to get the raw data manually, but many tools would help you to track this data. A few websites to get this data are Google Analytics, Buffer, bitly, etc. When you perform analysis, focus on the parameters that have gained success.

5. Lookout For Competition

As a social media success strategy, ensure that you find out your competitors before you enter the marketplace. This is an important parameter to measure social media success. A proper social media campaign performs the same. When you search in detail about your competitors, you will be able to get an idea of what works out good for them and what is lacking in your campaign. You can take some inputs from their campaign for your social media campaigns. Devote some time to analyze your competitors in various social media channels and it would do wonders for you.

6. Team Coordination

For a successful social media strategy to be in place, you should check that the coordination among various teams in your company is in place. In case you are in the perception that one person can do all these, it is wrong. You need the entire team’s coordination to be in place for it to work out smoothly. You require an independent team for the following:

• Content creation
• Content strategy 
• Interacting with clients
• Brand management, and so on

So, maintain a clear role for every domain and check that the entire team works towards the same goal.

7. Content Strategy

Yet another option to measure social media success is to have a proper content strategy in place. There is a popular saying that ‘Content is the King’ for the success of the campaign. For a successful social media campaign to be in place, you need to have a proper understanding of the requirement and a lot of thought goes into the content. Content strategy should be in place and is essential for measuring social media marketing success. Maintain a content calendar. You can get a template of the same for download.

• Use the content calendar to find out the media types and time you require to create on each social media channel.
• Ensure that the content in the form of blogs, images, video, infographics, etc fit into the right platform.
• Social media campaigns should have an effective strategy to distribute and execute your content.
• Have a control on the number of tweets to be published per day. It would standardize the process and have a consistent plan for your channels.

8. Do Not Hesitate To Spend

Social media campaigns would go well even if it does not make use of paid advertising. You need to have a suitable dedicated team and that put effort to perform organic reach. Measuring social media marketing success leads to success when you have profitable and targeted advertising in place. This does not require a great budget. Many social media platforms provide targeted advertising that guides you to reach the correct customers. This does not require more budget to implement. So, paid to advertise is essential for measuring social media success. It enables you to grow your social media channels at a fast pace.

9. Search For Your Ideal Customers And Target In That Channel

Pay attention to one specific social media channel rather than placing your hands in all. Perform the following:

• Perform research on where your ideal customers reside.
• Identify customers on specific social media channels.
• Find out which social media channel those identified customers reside in.
• On finding out which channels the customers are, you can promote your brand in those channels.
• In case, if any specific channel is not favorable for you, even though you have placed your efforts, better to focus on the ones that are working for your brand.

10. Visual Design

This is another parameter where you should pay attention to measure social media marketing success. Many businesses invest a lot in marketing and content creation and skip their attention to design costs. The presentation of any campaign is very important. When the campaign has a poor visual design on the social media platform it would turn off the customers. Make use of visual branding by taking guidance from experts to create icons, headers for your campaign. Also, ensure that it is updated on a regular basis to fit into the current trend.

11. Make Use Of Google Analytics

The popular and apt way to measure social media marketing success is to make use of Google Analytics. The reports provided by Google Analytics guides marketers with the influence of various social actions. It provides the information as to which social media platform has fetched you with good results, popular content, and conversions. Google Analytics provides the following reports:

• Network Referrals – This parameter shows the channel that users use to enter your website. 
• Data Hub Activity – This section displays the activity list, how many people have hit like, save, share, comment, on your content.
• Landing Pages – This section indicates the fame of your content page. It shows your website pages that get many views from various social media referrals.
• Trackbacks – This section displays the following:
  • Displays the websites that are linked to your content
  • Content being linked
  • Number of visitors who reach you through that channel

• Conversions – This section indicates the websites that get you more conversions

Conclusion

Every business is unique and has its business objectives. The stated strategies would measure the success of your social media channels and puts you in the right direction. So, incorporate these strategies to measure your social media success.