Let’s Get Social: How Do You Measure Social Media Success?

How to Measure Social Media Success

Author

These days we track everything. We track our steps taken, hours of sleep, click-throughs, calories in and out, emails received and responded to, and so much more. If it seems like your days are filled with looking at graphs, spreadsheets, and burn down charts – you’re not alone.

Which brings us to your social media success rate. How are you measuring your social media success? Ah yes, while having a social media content strategy and really engaging with your followers is vital – this doesn’t mean much if you don’t know if your social media strategy is working for you.

We want you to think of social media as a key component of your digital marketing strategy. And just like you have lots of tools for analyzing website analytics and understanding keyword success rate – you need to pay the same level of attention to your social media success (and missteps).

While, this can seem a bit tedious, we want you to remember a very key message: you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Read on to learn how you can simply and painlessly measure your social media success. Hint: we can help you with this – after all, we love doing analysis, number crunching, and helping you meet your digital marketing goals.

Don’t forget to read our earlier posts in our Let’s Get Social series: Let’s Get Social: Learning About Social Listening, Let’s Get Social: Learning About Social Media Engagement and Let’s Get Social: Learning About Social Media Content Planning and Publishing.

Step 1: Define Your Social Media Goals

Your social media goals should guide and inform how and why you’re on social media. Your social media goals should connect to the goals embedded in your digital marketing strategy. Think of these targets when you’re nailing down your social media goals:

  • Building brand and company awareness.
  • Establishing relationships with your key demographic.
  • Generating real sales leads.
  • Improving your customer service.
  • Driving new product and service ideas.
  • Promoting your company’s community involvement.

As you can understand, your social media goals are personal and specific to your brand and company. Be clear about your goals and what you want social media to do for you.

Step 2: Decide What You Should Measure

One of the catch-22s of social media measurement is that there is simply too much data. You need to know what you should measure and understand why you’re measuring these metrics. The best way to do this is to connect what you’re measuring to your social media goals.

Think about these social media metrics and how they do or don’t match-up with your social media goals and strategy.

  • Awareness.
  • Engagement.
  • Website traffic.
  • Followers, fans, and community.
  • Brand voice.

You might have a completely different list of social media metrics you want to measure – it all depends on what you want from social media.

Step 3: Measure Your Social Media Success

Yes, it’s time for the charts, spreadsheets, and number crunching of social media. The good news is that there are so many great tools available to help you measure your social media success.

However, we think you should go beyond the free download and contact us. After all, if you’re so committed to social media that you want to know your successes and failures – you need more than a free download.

Besides, with us tracking your social media success and giving you real professional analysis on what is and isn’t working, you don’t need to spend your time staring at spreadsheets and trying to understand how to use the free download.

If you do have extra hours in the day and want to drill down into your social media successes and mistakes, the next best thing you can do is search for a social media measurement tool. You’ll find lots of options and we do recommend you read the reviews on these free tools before you get started…

Step 4: Adjust Your Social Media Strategy

Remember the days before you started measuring your steps – you were blissfully unaware of how much you were walking. But now that you know you’re falling short of your 10,000 daily steps, you’re motivated to get outside and walk – and geez, you feel so much better.

Well, the same goes for your social media strategy success rate. Now that you’ve been measuring your social media success, it’s time to make the changes that you didn’t know you needed to implement.

We don’t want you to panic here, all you need to do is this:

  1. Remember your social media goals.
  2. Look at what you measured.
  3. Understand what the metrics are telling you.
  4. Adjust your social media goals (if needed).
  5. Listen to the messages buried in the metrics and adjust your social media strategy. This includes your social media engagement approach, your social media listening skills, and your social media content and publishing strategy.

While you have some work to do, we want you to congratulate yourself on taking a step that so many companies and brands neglect.

You know that to get real value from social media, you need to know why you’re doing what you’re doing and if it’s working.

Give yourself a big pat on the back for digging out from the sand and looking at the reality of your Tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram photos, and your digital conversations.

Step 5: Call In the Professionals 

We get it – you’re overwhelmed. This is why we want you to contact us. We know social media, digital marketing, content strategy, and all things SEO.

Remember that your social media success and strategy goes beyond a viral Tweet. Real social media success can’t happen if you don’t have a digital marketing strategy that includes SEO, content, competitive analysis, and useful metrics.

You stick to what you do best, and we’ll do what we do best for you.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Recent Blog Posts

What is Organic Search?
SEO

What is Organic Search?

Learn the seven keys to organic search success Organic search is the natural searching people do in search engines. People…