The Real Work Starts When A Social Media Campaign Begins

Social media is exploding as a leading business advertising platform, but many marketers are still uncertain if their social media efforts are paying off. Social media spending is expected to make up 20 percent of marketing budgets by 2020, according to the 2016 CMO Survey; that’s up from 6% of marketing budgets in 2009. But despite the increase, only about 3% of the marketers feel that social media contributes substantially to a company’s overall performance.
There’s disappointment around social media campaigns that aren’t accurately analyzed; in some studies, more than half of marketers polled said they were unable to tie social media performance to any measurable business outcomes. Various reasons were given for this, including inconsistent approach to analytics, poor analytics tools or unreliable data.

This disconnect is alarming. If social media is becoming the de facto way in which marketers reach out to consumers, and the way we consume these messages, then there has to be clear ways for brands to measure the KPIs for social media campaigns. In fact, there are ways to measure. It’s all about getting your team on board and setting an effective strategy.

Let’s look through at some of the top ways in which marketers can start the real work of analyzing social media campaigns

Using Google Analytics for social media

Google Analytics can give you information on traffic distribution. You can learn how much traffic is coming to your site from a social media channel, as well as knowing which web pages are being shared most frequently on social media.

Using Facebook Page Basics for analyzing Facebook campaigns

Using Facebook’s Page Basics Tool can help your company measure the number of likes, and where they came from. It also provides perspective on the amount of visits to your page, and if they came via Facebook or a search engine. Page Basics can also measure reach, which tracks how people comment on and share your content. It also notes if the shares came from organic reach or from paid ads.

Using Twitter Analytics for retweets and mentions

Along with 3rd party analytics tools, Twitter Analytics offers a host of tools that can measure the number of tweets over a day, week or month period; the tweet impressions you get, and how many mentions or followers you’ve received.

Having clear, concise goals will certainly help your social media measurement improve for all of your campaigns. What are the easiest ways?

• Get everyone on your team to fully understand what you want your social media to do – for your brand, for your web traffic, for your landing page conversions.
• Know the reasons why you’re measuring your social media – is it to gain new sales, more followers, or more traffic?
• Learn to track and measure these goals on a consistent weekly or monthly basis. If you’re a high-profile celebrity or brand, you might even want to do so on a daily basis.

Social media pros running campaigns on a regular basis need to know the essential elements of campaign metrics to accurately measure effectiveness. Your future social media campaign budgets will ultimately depend on how well the campaigns work to build leads, increase conversions and build overall business and traffic.