IN MANY WAYS, social media is the most important tool in your marketing strategy. But how do you know when social media campaigns are successful?
It all comes down to metrics. By knowing the metrics and what they mean, you’ll know what’s working, what isn’t, and what you can do to stand out and drive business toward your practice.
Tracking metrics allows you to analyze your campaigns’ effectiveness, observe trends, and identify improvement areas. Metrics allow you to make data-driven decisions, refine your content, and engage with your audience more effectively.
There are three distinct categories of metrics:
Awareness: Awareness gauges how many people your post reaches and how many times it’s been seen. It can be divided into two sub-categories:
- Impressions illustrate how often the post was featured on a feed, tracking how many times people saw the post.
- Reach refers to the amount of individual people who saw the post.
It’s important to track these together. E.g., if these numbers tell you people are seeing your posts three or four times in their feed and are not taking any action, it’s time to reconsider how effective the campaign is.
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Engagement and Amplification: Is a post performing if nobody is engaging with it? Probably not. These metrics track how many people interact with your post and how often their interactions are seen by their followers or friends. These can be described as actions users take, like reacting, commenting, following, subscribing, and sharing.
Comments and reactions indicate how people feel or think about your post. Shares indicate how influential it is — the more people share it, the more followers and subscribers you’re likely to find. These are the people who connect with your brand and want to see more of it. Tracking when you gain followers will give you valuable insights into what is clicking with your audience.
Conversions are the actions you would like your viewers to take, like signing up for a newsletter, downloading an e-book, or making a purchase. Tracking them gives you a look into what content resonates with your audience and help them foresee the value of converting with your brand.
Organic vs. PPC: There’s another metric to consider: the cost of your campaign, specifically pay-per-click performance.
If you make a post and start tracking the metrics without any additional support, this is measuring your “organic” social media metrics. However, if you put money into your campaign to help improve its reach, you’ll need to calculate the cost to get someone to click on the post and dive deeper.
For example, if you put $100 into a post and only get 2 clicks, the cost per click is $50. The more people click on the post, the less expensive the cost is for that click. For the best results, it is always a great idea to work with a professional. Even some guidance could take your campaigns much further than they would if you were to start fresh.
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