Measure Success in Your Social Media Strategy
Here in the Issuu Blog we want to see our readers succeed. We know it can be hard to define what success even means. If you’re staying hydrated and taking at least a moment a day to enjoy yourself, then you’re succeeding in life by our standards. But what about your social media strategy?
Marketers know the struggle of trying to show how much work they’re accomplishing. In the world of business, data talks. So we’re going to show you how to define success, how to measure it using data, and suggest some helpful tools to do just that. Let’s do some learning, another sign of success!
Just like in in our individual lives, this answer won’t be the same for everyone! Social media can be used in a countless amount of ways, so you need to know the goal of your company’s social media account before you can start measuring that success. Think to your company’s business goals, how can your social media account help with that? Suppose your company is focused on getting its name out there, then Brand Awareness would be your goal as the social media manager. If increasing sales is your company’s goal for the quarter, then you want to focus on driving traffic. Have a conversation with your team to figure out how your social media can best help your company succeed!
Tip: You might have more than one goal and that’s ok! Just be sure to prioritize!
How do we measure success?
Data is key in social media strategy. Once you’ve figured out how you want to use your social media to help your company, you can decide which metric of data will give you the best feedback as to what works. Here are a few different metrics you can measure your social media’s success by!
Engagement Rate – the number of times that users engaged with your posts, including when they liked, @replied, retweeted, or clicked on your posts.
Impressions – the number of times that all of your posts were displayed to a user.
Link Clicks – the number of times that all of your posts were displayed to a user during the reporting period
Followers – the number of individual accounts that follow yours
Once you’ve decided which metric will reflect your growth in relation to your company’s goals, then it’s all about tracking, listening, and adapting. Doing weekly and monthly reports based on your data will be a little extra work that can make a world of difference for your social strategy. Tracking which posts hit and which don’t can help you make the necessary changes to see great success in your strategy!
What tools can I use?
When it comes to measuring social media analytics, there are a lot of helpful programs and tools available online for you to use. Here a few we recommend from experience!
Sprout Social
Keyhole
Buffer
Google Analytics
Shopify