How to Measure the Success of a Social Media Campaign

Your social media campaign is one of the most exciting parts of your digital marketing. However, it can also be the most difficult because it is always changing. You’re likely to find new features every now and then on channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Every time these platforms upgrade their features and algorithm, revamping your campaign strategies becomes essential too.

For that reason, it is important to track your results from these campaigns constantly while also making sure you are looking into the most important metrics. You want to measure what is going on around your social media activities so you can know what is successful, what is not, and find ways to improve.

Top Metrics to Measure

Metrics represent how you are going to measure whether you are achieving your social media campaign goals. Whether you are taking the organic approach or running paid ad campaigns, there are certain metrics you need to track. 

Link Clicks

These are the number of clicks on links appearing in your ads and posts that direct users off Facebook. Link clicks are valuable since they tell you the level of engagement your ad or post generates among your audience.

Examples of link clicks include:

• Clicks on an image or a CTA button within an ad
• Clicks on the URL in the post’s text description
• Clicks on ad formats that direct users into a full-screen experience (e.g. Lead forms, Canvas and collection)
• Clicks on links within text of posts and ads on News Feeds that direct users to websites and app stores

Reach vs. Impressions

Reach and Impressions are tricky metrics. Reach is the total number of unique people who see your posts while impressions are the number of times your posts were seen, whether it was clicked or not.

Let us say there is a post in your feed that appeared multiple times. If we were measuring reach for this post, then it would be one. That is because it was only you who saw it. However, if we were measuring impressions and the post was displayed twice from two different sources, then that would equal to two impressions.

It is important to know the difference between the two of them in order to focus on the more important one. Also, to help you understand how engaged and active your fans are.

If you are aiming to get your content in front of a specific number of people, you should be looking at reach. If you want your content displayed in your audience’s feeds as many times as possible, impressions would be the right metric to check.

While other networks like Twitter and Instagram include reach and impressions in their analytics, they are pretty standard. Facebook, on the other hand, breaks them down by post type and other categories. If your goal is to improve either one of these metrics, Facebook can be a good platform to start with.

Three categories of Reach (on Facebook)

Organic – This is the number of unique people who saw your posts in their feeds, for free.

Paid – This is the number of unique people who saw your paid content or ad.

Viral – This is the number of unique people who saw your post as another person created a story about it. This can happen when a fan of your page likes, comments or shares your post.

Three categories of Impressions (on Facebook)

Organic – This is the number of times your posts was displayed in the feeds of your audience, or on your page, for free.

Paid – This is the number of times your paid content or ad was displayed.

Viral – This is the number of times your posts was displayed as another person created a story about it. This can happen when a fan of your page likes, comments or shares your post.

Platform Engagement

Engagement comes in the form of likes, shares, tweets, reposts, follows, ratings, comments, etc. Measuring the engagement metrics allows you to learn how people are engaging with your brand. This allows you to see if your audience is interested in your content and whether or not they like it enough to share it with others.

There are many ways to boost your social media engagement. But nothing beats creating valuable content that will not only entertain your audience but also inspire them to react. Remember, social media marketing becomes ineffective without quality engagement.

Measuring Your Social Media Campaign Success

Is it a success or not?

Once you have defined the right metrics, it’s time to check whether the campaign results were able to achieve your campaign goals. Go back and take a look at the main reasons that urge you to do social media marketing. Then, evaluate if your efforts have paid off.

An example of a social media goal could be: To acquire an average of 1000 engagements per Facebook post over 30 days.

After a month, try looking at the engagement metrics to see what kind of content your followers engaged with most favorably. In Facebook, you can review each post individually to find out which posts are the most engaging.

The formula for engagement is:

Likes + Comments + Shares + Clicks + Reach = Engagement

Did the results match your campaign goals? If not, perhaps you need to create more eye-catching content.

Why is it important to check your campaign’s effectiveness?

The point of doing this is not only to prove the success of your social media campaign but also to improve its value over time. Social media is constantly changing, hence the importance of running an updated campaign. 

Considering that most social networks have built-in analytics reports, it is easier to identify which areas you need to improve upon. If it seems that your campaign is failing, make sure to make adjustments as soon as possible. It might be necessary to seek assistance from an experienced digital marketing team to help you identify which parts of your social media campaign should be adjusted.

Additionally, there are other metrics – such as Influence, Volume, Share of Voice – that can also help define your social media success. There are also a lot of social media tools that can measure these metrics like Google Analytics, Sprout Social and Hootsuite. Make sure you put them in place before running any kind of campaign. The last thing you want to happen is to see your efforts go to waste.

How is your social media doing? Talk to us and we can discuss how to create a solid social media and digital marketing team so you can rest easy that your social media campaign will be effective, without having to worry about day-to-day maintenance.