Any marketing strategy effort needs a measuring strategy to accompany it.
If you want your social media content efforts to pay off and go in the right direction, you need to ensure that you have a way to track its success.
Here are 4 metrics you can use to measure social media success.
Monitor Audience Growth
When building a community on social media, you want to track the growth your social media efforts are resulting in. With Facebook and Instagram insights, for instance, you can easily track the growth of your followers over time. Monitoring this growth can help you also measure the success of campaigns and streamline your social media strategy.
Measure Reach
Closely related to audience growth, your reach would help you understand your visibility on social media. Using insights, you can even get numbers to measure organic reach, viral reach (social sharing), as well as paid reach.
In terms of organic reach, you can measure the success of the hashtags’ strategy you used, for example, in expanding your reach. You can also determine which is the best time to post to optimise your reach.
Build and Measure Engagement
Apart from measuring your audience and reach, you would want to measure the success of your social media content in terms of the activity it is inspiring. This would mean keeping a check on mentions, likes, comments, and social sharing.
Measuring engagement can help you determine what kind of content your audience wants, interacts with, shares, thereby helping you streamline your social media content strategy as you go.
And if your audience mentions you on social media, you would want to be part of the conversation, wouldn’t you?
Click Rates
Finally, you mustn’t ignore click rates. Click rates are important when you are trying to measure conversions through social media. These might not always be paid clicks. Apart from ads, clicks on posts can help you understand how your followers engage with you and what kind of content is making them click.
With Facebook or LinkedIn, for example, you can track the clicks on posts you make there to share web content like blog posts. These clicks can help you determine what kind of content drives the most traffic to your website.