Social media marketing has become increasingly important in recent years, and the quality of an overall social media strategy and individual campaigns can make or break a brand. But how do you measure social media success? Conversion rates are the obvious measure of success for any marketing effort, but in this blog we’ll take a look at some of the other ways in which you can gauge how well your business’s social media strategies are performing.
One of the simplest measurements to consider is what is sometimes referred to as “social proof.” In terms of social media, the simplest way to think of this is that the number of followers, views, favorites and likes you have reflects how your brand is perceived. A business with a Twitter account that has 100 followers will be perceived differently from an account with 1,000 followers, or 10,000, in terms of reputation and trustworthiness. One measure of social media success is to compare your own brand’s performance in these areas with the metrics of your closest competitors, as well as industry leaders.
Of course, return on investment is another important measure of success for any and all marketing activities. This can be fairly easy to work out in terms of comparing social media spend with the value of sales generated by that marketing activity. But you should also be able to track ROI in terms of its success against non-financial metrics, such as improving customer retention or generating more email list signups. It’s vital to have visibility of your whole sales funnel to gauge the impact that your social media activities and spending have on relevant metrics.
Although we’ve been looking at this mainly from the view of marketing and sales, customer service is also an important metric to consider when measuring social media success. Customer service goes hand-in-hand with customer retention, and in an age where customers are increasingly using social media platforms as their first point of contact for getting in touch with businesses, it’s important to get it right first time.
There are a number of tools that businesses can use to facilitate customer service via social media channels. It may be appropriate to use a chatbot or otherwise have automated replies set up to answer basic customer queries. Outside of that, saved replies to common customer queries can help your customer service team be more efficient and more responsive to customer queries.
Social listening can also be vital to maintaining brand reputation. While some unhappy customers will message you directly on social media to vent their frustrations, others may tag your brand account in a public post. It’s important to have measures in place – ideally through an automated social media management tool – to check regularly for mentions and tags, so that your customer service team can respond quickly to customer complaints, as well as any positive mentions that you can engage with or amplify.
In terms of measuring social media success with regard to customer service, you will want to set targets and record metrics such as speed of response time, social media engagement and customer retention levels.
Overall, it’s important when planning your social media strategy and individual campaigns to set targets and establish the metrics by which you want to measure success. We hope that this blog has given some ideas on factors to consider when analyzing your brand’s social media success.