5 Easy Steps to Measure Social Media Campaigns

If you’re using social media for your business, you should be measuring it. But don’t measure just for the sake of having metrics. Instead, measure your social activities so that you can learn what’s successful, what isn’t and how you can improve.

Social media is generally measured in two ways: ongoing analytics and campaign-focused metrics. Ongoing analytics, which track activity over time, are necessary for keeping up with the overall pulse of general conversation about your brand and company. Once your brand tracking is set up, you can just let it run and check in regularly to see how everything is going.

Campaign-focused metrics, on the other hand, can help you understand the impact of targeted marketing initiatives and will vary from campaign to campaign, depending on your goals for each. An effective social media measurement program will likely include both ongoing and campaign-specific measurement.

Here are five easy steps to get started tracking your own social media campaigns:

Related: 10 Little Known Social Media Tools You Should Be Using — Now

1. Determine your goals.
Before you jump into measuring every single tweet, photo and Facebook comment posted about your brand, first think about your goals with social media. What are you trying to accomplish or gain through these channels? Which channels are most relevant to those goals?

Social media can serve a variety of purposes, from broadcasting news and information, to answering customer questions and engaging with a community. Generate a list of what you’re trying to achieve from your social media efforts.

Next, think about what you want your audience to do with your content on the social channels you’re using. Are you trying to get them to read, share, reply, click, purchase or engage?

2. Create metrics to measure your goals.
Match your goals to actual metrics and behaviors you can measure. For example, if you’re trying to measure engagement, then what is the practical form of engagement you want to track? Is it retweets or reposts? Replies or comments? Clicks? Here are a few suggestions of behaviors to measure, based on a few common social media goals:

• If you want to measure awareness, then use metrics such as volume, reach, exposure and amplification. How far is your message spreading?
• If you want to measure engagement, then look for metrics around retweets, comments, replies and participants. How many people are participating, how often are they participating and in what forms are they participating?
• If your goal is to drive traffic to your website, track URL shares, clicks and conversions. Are people moving through social media to your external site and what do they do once they’re on your site?
• If your goal is to find advocates and fans, then track contributors and influence. Who is participating and what kind of impact do they have?
• If your goal is to increase your brand’s share of voice, then track your volume relative to your closest competitors. How much of the overall conversation around your industry or product category is about your brand?

[Read More...]

Jenn Deering Davis is a co-founder of San Francisco-based Union Metrics, the company behind TweetReach, a provider of Twitter analytics.