Let’s assume that you’ve got all the strategy stuff sorted. You’ve set your objectives and goals, and you’ve got a good plan as to how you’re moving forward with social media. Are you ready to kick off? Well, no, not if you don’t know how you’ll be tracking your success! In fact, if you remember, understanding how you’ll measure your progress is a key component of any meaningful goal. So let’s take a look at how this might work.

Often, when we’re setting goals, what we find tricky is the measurement bit. You can't just guess or assume things are going well, you need a quantitative and tangible way of knowing whether you're doing a good job. You need metrics, which are just numbers...whether it’s a total count, an average, a ratio, or a percentage.

The good news is that there’s a tonne of them, and they measure different elements of your social media campaigns. The ones you choose to measure are typically referred to as Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, and which ones are right for you depend on your goals and objectives. Let’s go through some potential examples...

If you’re aiming your social media efforts towards audience growth, you’ll want to track the amount of followers or subscribers you’re acquiring.

Reach and awareness, on the other hand, which is all about getting your brand in front of fresh audiences, can be measured through the volume of impressions your content receives, survey results, and social media analytics.

Likes, mentions, reactions, shares, comments, votes, link clicks and views can all be used to formulate KPIs relating to engagement. Many of these actions are users literally submitting a response to what you’re putting out there, so it’s no surprise that they provide a clear idea of whether or not your content is going down well with audiences.

You could also measure conversions. Sales, site and page visits, sign ups, and app downloads are all different types of conversions, and keeping an eye on how many you generate is a great way of figuring out not just whether your campaigns are going down well, but also whether they’re persuading users to take a desired action.

If you want to know how you’re getting on with improving loyalty, you’ll want to look at engagement and conversion metrics to see if your content is making an increasingly favorable impression on them, and if they’re making bigger purchases more frequently.

As for customer service, effective KPIs might concern the volume of consumer issues logged and resolved, the time it takes to respond to and resolve an issue, social media sentiment analysis, and customer satisfaction scores from surveys and feedback.

Of course, most of the time, when it comes down to it, businesses stick around to make money, and so, they might want to go for a timeless classic in business metrics. Something like ROI, or return on investment. How much did you spend, and how much did you make in return?

Keep in mind that not all engagement is equal. Passive engagement, such as likes, or when people share something but don’t comment on it, requires little effort from users and is valued less highly by platform algorithms, than active and peer-to-peer engagement. For this reason, brands should look to encourage comments and conversations between users to get their audience actively engaging with one another and signal to platform algorithms that their conversations have value.

These metrics offer a worthwhile perspective for any brand looking to be successful on social media, but it’s worth stressing that it’s all constantly evolving, making it pretty difficult to pin down metrics that can be relied on for comparison over time. But, as long as you’re mindful of this and remain sensitive to changes in this area, you won’t go too far wrong.

Measuring Success

About