Is Social Working for You?

How to Measure Social Media Success

Gary Vaynerchuck famously said, “Saying hello doesn’t have an ROI.” What he meant is that the value of relationship building can’t be measured so easily. This is why it can be so hard to measure social media success.

The first step is to define a clear goal for your social media marketing. An example would be to grow an email list of qualified buyers. Take this goal and then figure out how you can tell whether you’re reaching it or not.

 

Engagement on Social Media

The goal of social media isn’t to sell directly. It’s to create engagement and build a relationship. For this reason, you should start measuring success by how much your content is engaging your audience.

Engagement can be measured by things like:

• Clicks on links in your social media posts (this can be measured through your website analytics or Facebook pixel)
• Comments on your social media posts
• Shares and, on Twitter, retweets
• Ratings and comments on your YouTube videos
• Comments and shares on your blog posts
• Mentions of your company or brand on social media (you can set up alerts to find these).

While growth can be a measure that you’re doing something right, it’s not a very good metric to measure. You can grow your followers a great deal without it necessarily translating to any kind of results. The goal of your social media is engagement and conversions, not simply numbers.

The goal of your social media is engagement and conversions, not simply numbers. Click To Tweet

 

Taking Action – Measuring Conversions

An even more important way to measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing is to look at actual results that came from social media. If the end goal is to lead people to your website where they make a purchase, ask your customers directly or with a survey what referred them to your site. See how many of them are referred from social media.

It is definitely worth setting up Google Analytics on your website as this will tell you exactly how many and where your target audience has come from.

It is definitely worth setting up Google Analytics on your website as this will tell you exactly how many and where your target audience has come from. Click To Tweet

All the social media sites have good analytics now. For example, on your Facebook Page under Insights, you can see the number of:

Followers
Likes
Reach
Page views
Page previews
Actions on Page
Post Engagement
Video views.

These can be measured for different time periods and then compared with another period. You can even export the data.

Sales aren’t the only measurement. Whatever action it is you’d like this traffic to take can also be measured. You may want them to sign up for your email list, for example. In that case, again, you’d measure how many of the subscribers came to your list through social media.

The key is knowing what you are really trying to achieve.