What is the one thing many of us do first thing in the morning? We reach over to our cell phones and scroll through multiple applications to absorb the latest news and information. We start our day using social media and often conclude it the same way. Because of this pattern, marketers heavily rely on social media to increase brand awareness and clout around their products and services.
Social media is a powerful platform to reach your desired target audience. There are ample benefits of utilizing different channels to generate profits for your business but to reap those benefits, you need to have the right strategy in place. Part of this strategy should always include analytics. Measuring how well your social media campaigns are doing is critical if you want to improve your ROI and stay relevant.
What is the date you need to track? Which key performance indicators will give you the best big picture? Let’s talk about how you can effectively measure your social media performance.
Follower Count
Once you have established your accounts on different social media platforms, you need to grow a rich base of followers. Whether through organic or inorganic means, having a good follower count will allow you to reach a large audience base.
For example, if you are a small business operating from Instagram alone, you need to focus on building a community of real Instagram followers that can potentially turn into paying customers. You can study and note the numbers on a daily basis. If you notice a dip in the number of followers after a week of tracking, this means that you need to rethink your campaigns and content. But if you are growing steadily, you are doing well and need to continue according to plan.
Engagement
While having a substantial number of followers is essential, it is equally important to have followers who engage with your content. The typical types of engagement include likes, comments, shares, retweets, and replies based on the platform you are looking at.
If you have thousands of followers but a very poor engagement rate, this means that your content is not making an impact. You need to have relevant and highly engaging material that makes a person stop and spend some time on your account.
If more people are engaging with your content and hitting the like, retweet, or reshare button, it will bump up and be visible to more people on that channel due to its popularity. Therefore an engaged audience will help your base grow organically, so it is crucial to keep track.
Conversion
When measuring your social media performance, the most important metric to measure is customer acquisition and conversion. Usually, your brand’s followers would be people who are already users of your product or services. They may even be engaging with your content and hitting the like and subscribe button.
But how many new and unique users are going all the way converting into customers? This is crucial to understand the ROI of your social media efforts. You should monitor which social media channel produces the most significant number of leads for your business to know where you need to focus your attention. High-performing channels will tell you to continue what you are doing, and low-performing channels will indicate whether you need to shift from that platform or use an alternate approach.
Customer Satisfaction
Once you have built a solid foundation of your social media channels, you need to measure how successful the admin is in keeping customers happy and taken care of. This means that you need to first measure the response rate of your account. This will give you the percentage of queries and comments that were answered by the admin running your page.
A high number means you are doing well in responding to your followers. You also need to analyze the time it took to answer those queries, the response rate. Being speedy and swift will keep people engaged and interested.
You should also pay attention to brand mentions which will alert you to the overall sentiment about your brand. A positive rapport is a good indicator of your efforts, whereas poor and negative comments mean that you should resolve customer complaints.
Conclusion
Having a solid social media strategy is only the first step, you need to be able to measure its performance in order to make continuous improvements. Start by measuring weekly or monthly reporting based on the pointers we have spoken about and identify which metrics are most important to you as a business. Remember that, viewing different metrics together will give you the best picture of success.
