Measuring your social media campaigns is the final phase before you start the process over. Here’s how to measure social media campaign success.
Creating campaigns is just one of many steps in social media marketing. Once you’ve developed the content, set your ad budget, and shared your ideas with the world, your work still isn’t done. You also need to track your campaign’s performance through campaign measurement to see how your efforts are paying off. Without a way to measure social media campaign success, you’ll be in the dark when it comes to knowing if you’re on the right track.
Social media campaign measurement gives you a clearer idea of what’s working and what’s not. Your content deserves to be recognized, and tracking its success can help you decide how to capture your audience’s attention.
While analyzing your content might sound as exciting as a root canal, fear not! There are ways to make this process one of the easiest things you’ll do all day. Here’s how to measure social media campaigns like you know what you’re doing.
Table of Contents
Why Measure Social Media Campaigns?
How To Measure a Successful Social Media Campaign in 5 Steps
How To Measure Social Media Campaign Success With Meltwater
Tip: Learn more about campaign measurement in general, how to measure influencer marketing campaigns, how to measure ad campaign effectiveness, how to measure brand awareness, how to measure customer experience, how to measure digital marketing campaigns, and how to measure email marketing campaigns.
Why Measure Social Media Campaigns?
Social media is constantly evolving. To keep up with your competition and make sure your campaigns are on point, you need to measure their success.
Ongoing measurement ensures your campaigns are effective. The whole point of a campaign is to achieve a certain goal, whether it’s increasing brand awareness or generating leads. By measuring your campaigns, you can see which ones are performing well and which ones need to be improved.
You'll also need to break down your campaign measurements by platform. For example, measuring the success of a Facebook campaign will vary from your Instagram or LinkedIn campaigns. They each cater to different audiences and will therefore require campaign-specific content, a different strategy, and different social media analytics.
Campaign metrics also allow you to track your progress over time. By tracking your social media KPIs, you can see how far you’ve come and what areas still need work. You can adjust your strategies accordingly and keep moving in the right direction.
How To Measure a Successful Social Media Campaign in 5 Steps
Digital marketers need to be many things: creative, resourceful, big-picture thinkers, and technologically savvy, for example. They also need to be good with numbers so they can make sense of their social media data and analytics.
With a good process, the numbers are the easy part. Here’s how to measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign in five simple steps:
Step 1: Define Your Social Media Goals
Setting goals is always the first step in any type of marketing. Without a goal, you can’t decide what success looks like, nor will you be able to measure your success or know if your strategy is on track.
There are a few different ways to approach setting social media goals. One way is to choose objectives that align with your business goals. For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, you might set a goal to get more followers on social media platforms.
Another way to set social media goals is by considering what you want your audience to do as a result of seeing your content. For instance, if you want them to purchase a product, click on a link, or sign up for a newsletter, make sure those desired actions are reflected in your goals.
Have clear ideas about what you want to get out of your campaigns. Put those goals on paper and get consensus among your marketing team. With everyone working toward the same goals, you can create campaigns that will best achieve those outcomes.
Step 2: Choose the Right KPIs To Track and Measure
Social media KPIs give you the hard data you need to see that your campaigns are working. Example social media metrics include, but are not limited to:
- Audience/follower count before and after the campaign
- Increase in follower growth
- Likes
- Shares
- Comments
- Click-throughs
- Link clicks
- Conversion rate (e.g., signups, purchases, etc.)
- Impressions
- Post reach
- Potential reach
- Share of voice
- Cost per click (CPC)
- Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
- Applause rate (total positive actions divided by total followers, multiplied by 100 to calculate the percentage)
- Amplification rate (how many people in your audience share your content with their audience)
With so many different metrics to choose from, how do you know which ones are the most important? Here are a few factors to consider:
- Align your KPIs with your original goals. Whether you want to increase brand awareness or engagement or drive more traffic to your website, choose KPIs that relate to your goal.
- Consider your target audience. Different demographics will respond differently to various types of content, so it’s important to know who you’re trying to reach before you select your KPIs.
- Differentiate for the platforms you’re using. Different social media platforms track different metrics. For example, learning how to measure Facebook campaign success will be different than measuring success on Twitter. See what’s available in your analytics dashboards.
You might have a mixture of insights and metrics, from engagement to conversions to brand awareness. That’s fine! The goal is to choose KPIs that reflect whether your social media marketing strategy is paying off.
Step 3: Measure Your Campaign Results
Once you launch your campaign, it’s time to measure and optimize social media marketing campaigns. You don’t have to wait until your campaign is over. Depending on the analytics platform you’re using, you may be able to track movement in real time.
Speaking of which, you’ll also need to choose the right tools to measure social marketing campaign success. For example, if your goals are to increase brand awareness, a platform like Meltwater can help to track brand mentions across social media and other channels.
Google Analytics is another helpful campaign-focused tool for tracking website traffic and engagement. You can see what content your audience is engaging with, how long they’re staying on a landing page, bounce rate, and other metrics.
If you’re not sure which tools you should be using, go back to step one. Everything you do to measure campaign performance should align with your goals. With those goals in mind, you can choose tools that capture the right data and make it easy to analyze your results.
Step 4: Monitor, Analyze, and Report
With real-time platforms like Meltwater, you can monitor performance over time, not just when your campaign starts and ends. You can track your progress over weeks, months, and even years to see how your brand is growing in the market.
With this data, you can see how cost-effective your social media marketing campaigns are. Cost effectiveness can help you justify spending more on future campaigns or allocate more funds to one platform versus another.
At this phase, you can also analyze whether a portion of your results is coming from a specific influencer. If your content resonates with an influential person and they share it with their audience, it might be worthwhile to form a partnership with that influencer to build on your wins. They can promote you in other ways to their followers to help you gain even more traction.
These points illustrate why choosing the right social media measurement tools matters. You can easily create custom reports from your data to provide to leaders and C-suite executives that demonstrate how you’re making a difference. The less time you have to spend on reports, the more time you can dedicate to optimizing your campaigns.
Tip: Learn more about Influencer Marketing Reporting & Analytics
Step 5: Refine and Repeat
Now that you have a clearer idea of how your social media campaigns are performing, now is the time to go back and make them even better.
For example, if you’re not getting many clicks or conversions, you could A/B test a different call to action. If you’re getting lots of click-throughs to your website but no sales, then you might need to tweak your landing page. Or it could be that your ad content has failed to engage your audience.
There’s a lot of information to look at during this phase. But when you’ve set goals and selected KPIs that best reflect those goals, your range of focus becomes narrower. You can more easily prioritize the right things when you’re not trying to measure, review, and refine everything.
How To Measure Social Media Campaign Success With Meltwater
Measuring the impact of social media marketing campaigns makes all the difference. It’s the only way to know for sure your message is being received by the right people. It also gives you clear ways to improve your content and approach so you can maximize your social media ROI.
Meltwater helps you run better social media campaigns with real-time data across multiple channels. We deliver insights from classic platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as well as up-and-coming Chinese social media platforms, and more.
What’s more, we transform your data into insights using a combination of AI and human analysts. Take your data to the next level by seeing what’s working and what’s not, and what you can do next.
Simply fill out the form below to request a demo of the Meltwater solutions.
