Tracking and analyzing your social media marketing
You can’t measure the results your work without looking at the results. You might be putting some witty tweets out, but are they matching up with the aims you set out at the beginning? Here’s how to to make sure your social media marketing is results-driven.
Social media tracking and analysis tools
To start with, social listening tools can do everything you need for this. Our platform, for example, can look at conversations across the internet, and also analyze your performance on your own channels in real-time. With lots of data visualizations and useful components, it covers pretty much everything.
There are also a plenty of other analysis tools, which we’ve listed in the pieces below:
What metrics to track
It is tempted to list a few metrics and send you on your way, but that’s not how it works. Different metrics are important to different companies and aims. This is the key to finding the right focus in a sea of metrics (that often overlap or are contradictory).
Below we’ll list a few common metrics and what they’re useful for. Compare them to your strategy aims to see what fits for you.
An excellent indicator of how many people want to see what you post, but this doesn’t always translate into good results. Are your followers people who will actually buy your products, or do whatever else you want them to do?
This is where created relevant content comes in. Create the right stuff, and you should avoid this problem (although it’s not particularly bad problem to have).
In the end, it’s a good metric for indicating you’re going in the right direction, but it’s not something to live or die by.
This refers to a whole bunch of things, but ultimately it comes down to whether people are clicking on your social posts. This could be to like it, share it, or be taken to your website, it’s all the same deal.
It can be measured in a few ways, but the big two are by volume, and by engagement rate. Engagement rate usually refers to the percentage of your followers, or people who saw the post, who engaged with a post. simple stuff.
The problem comes with engagement referring to so many different actions. It’s too vague. For example, two tweets could get the same engagement rate, but give you different results. One may get 12 likes, the other 12 clicks, with two leading to a sale. That’s two very different outcomes.
It’s important to parse down engagement, and single out the specific metrics that properly measure success for your campaigns.
How much traffic you get from your social posts is a good metric to include for most campaigns, especially ones that aim to get people to your site.
But don’t lose focus. Going broad and off-topic makes getting traffic easier, but is it traffic that offers any value? What do you want people to do when they get to your site? If they’re not doing it, it may be time to swtich tactics.
Reach usually refers to how many people see a social post. This will depend on the amount of followers an account already has, how many of these people the platforms algorithm will show it too, and how many people share it to their own followers on top of that. Hashtag discovery, and other routes, can also increase reach.
It’s also measured differently on different platforms, offering wildly different numbers. We aimed to solve this issue with our own reach score that aims to far more simple and trustworthy.
At the risk of repeating ourselves, we have the same issues that traffic has. The bigger the reach the better, in theory, but if it doesn’t lead to your campaign’s goal, it’s not doing any heavy lifting.
