Tom Welbourne
Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
Best Practices For Measuring A Social Media Campaign
- August 28, 2019
- , 2:00 pm
Nowadays social media is everywhere, most can’t go a day without posting their latest Instagram story or tweeting updates with their friends, which is why social media is immensely important to marketers. Producing an engaging yet effective social media campaign is essential to building a brand’s visibility, increasing your base of loyal customers and reaching into new markets.
Even though the campaign is where the real money is made, the behind-the-scenes of the campaign (campaign analytics, measuring and tracking) is where you’ll find the most valuable source of data. Nevertheless, according to MDG Advertising, 44% of organisations don’t measure the impact of social media on their business and 36% of organisations feel as though they have a good qualitative sense of the impact but can’t quantify it.
Social media campaign monitoring and tracking are fantastic ways to measure the performance of your social media marketing initiatives and activity. Here you’ll find what elements really pushed your brand even further into the minds and hearts of your consumer, and what parts didn’t even make it past the finish line. You’ll also be able to quantify the success of your campaign, identifying which elements were key in driving leads and which social media platforms are most suited to your reaching your target audience. Knowing this information will help your business save more money as you can reallocate your time and resources to the marketing platforms which are most effective.
Here are our three best practices when measuring the success of your social media campaign:
1. SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS DASHBOARD
It can be hard to keep on top of all your numerous marketing efforts when running a campaign. Therefore, creating a simple dashboard using your preferred social analytics platform will manage this for you.
Social media analytics tools, for example, Keyhole, have incorporated this into their offering already providing you with an overview of each of the key aspects in your dataset. The tool shows you an array of different information from when your users are most active, the number of impressions, reach, posts and engagements to identifying key influencers in specific industries.
Therefore make sure you don’t miss out on all this data by either setting up one yourself or using a tool which does!
2. ANALYTICS TOOLS
There are so many different analytics tools out there, with each one providing your business key insights into your social media efforts.
Google Analytics is free analytics dashboard, making it a perfect tool to provide you with invaluable insights about your social media audience, such as the number of leads converted, visitor demographics, the websites your traffic came from and so on. In pairing your social media campaign with Google Analytics, you’ll really be able to find out what makes your audience tick, which content the react the best to and what excites your audience, hence providing you with all the information needed to replicate and further that success.
Facebook also offers a free analytics tool – Facebook Insights. As the name suggests, it lets you measure and monitor the performance of your business’s Facebook page. Tracking core metrics such as likes, page views, shares, comments and more will help you understand how your social media campaign efforts are measuring against your goals. Facebook page’s metrics will also provide you with the information you need to make sure you’re putting the right content in front of the right audience. Therefore, instead of publishing posts to the entire Facebook platform, make sure you target your posts to your desired audience so your brand reaches those who are most likely to engage with you.
Instagram Insights, similar to Google and Facebook analytics, is an analytics tool which provides data on follower demographics, actions and content insights. Uncovering these specific insights, for example, the number of impressions, the number of accounts reached or audience profile makes this is a great tool to use particularly if you’re looking to increase your Instagram engagement and following.
3. GOOGLE URL BUILDER
As described by Google themselves, Google URL Builder “allows you to easily add campaign parameters to URLs so you can track Custom Campaigns in Google Analytics.” In other words, the tool allows you to measure which elements of your marketing campaigns are succeeding and which aren’t quite meeting your standards.
Using social media dashboards and analytics tools are great for learning more about your user and what types of social posts are the most effective with your audience. However, if you want to drill down further to find out which channels your traffic is coming from and how they got here, i.e. was it from your Facebook post you published last week or was it a company page, then Google URL Builder is perfect for you.
Once you have finished a campaign and have gathered all the necessary data and insights, you must put what you’ve learnt to use. If you’ve found that your Facebook audience is most active on weekends, then start scheduling your content for then. If you found that users engaged with visual content more than copy, then put more emphasis on that, and so on.
Reflecting on all the key takeaways and lessons learnt will help your brand to grow and develop, making for a stronger brand that your customers will love.
