How to get started with measuring your social media campaign

Social media is not something new even though it’s still a buzz phrase online. This medium can be an excellent component that can support your business processes and other marketing campaigns. Many businesses are utilising social media already, but do they know if it’s actually working?

When you search online for social media or anything relevant, many of the results will be about the latest and greatest social media platforms and how content should be the centerpiece of your campaigns. Even though this is good, not a lot of information is available on measuring your social media campaign. Here are a couple of tips on how you can get started with tracking your efforts.

Track clicks and visitors

Do you know what types of content you are publishing are more effective than others? Are you using specific hashtags with every post that you make? If you do, which hashtags are working? Are you using any analytics software such as Google Analytics to determine how many people are actually clicking through to your site from social channels and how often this happens?

There are many social media tools that can provide you with information regarding the clicks and visitors you generate from your campaign. One that I use often is Hootsuite where I can manage multiple accounts and generate reports regarding my campaigns. This feature is in the pro version, but it’s definitely worth it as you can see how many clicks were generated and during which times of the day they were clicked on. This can help you analyse what types of content are popular so that you can generate more of the same kind of content and in return generate more clicks.

Track user engagement

Tracking user engagement and behaviour is great especially if you are running a blog. This type of tracking can be done with Google Analytics and the blogging platform that you are using like WordPress. When measuring this data you will be able to analyse how your visitors are using your website once they have arrived at your website via social media. You can track which channels are driving the most targeted traffic to your website, which pages/posts are the most popular, where they are based geographically, etc.

You can also measure call to actions and your sales funnel with Google Analytics. Setting this up is pretty straightforward, but if you want to measure your sales funnel at a deeper level, have a look at setting up goals in Google Analytics.

Measure ROI

With social media, working out the return on investment (ROI) can be a real pain if you don’t have solid metrics that translate directly back to your business. Social media is really great to generate awareness and to spark engagement, but sometimes connecting the lines on the revenue front can be a real challenge. The key with working out the ROI of your social media campaign is to look at where social media falls in your sales funnel.

Start analysing the conversions that are generated via social media on your website. It may be that your social media campaign was the first touch point that drove the interest (awareness — top of the funnel). Then the customer might have search organically to find additional information and finally clicked on a PPC ad to generate a lead. If you only look at the PPC part, you may think it was only the ad that generated the lead — but the impact of your social media presence also influenced the conversion. Make a point to look at all aspects of your campaigns when measuring conversions.

You will find lots of information online that concludes that social media doesn’t impact ROI because they are really not measuring this medium correctly. It’s not difficult to setup and integrate measurement tools such as Google Analytics in your campaign. If you are not measuring the outcome of your campaign, do you really know what is driving results or how you can make improvements on your campaign?