Social media marketing success. Everyone has been talking about doing social media marketing this year but how many of you know how to measure success in social media marketing?
How do you know if your social media strategies are paying off?
Should you be investing more time into Facebook, Twitter or a dozen of other social platforms?
Measuring social media success is one of the most challenging (and frustrating) challenges businesses will face and most of them, would put a lesser focus on it.
And trust me, that’s a wrong move!
But why should you be measuring your social media success?
The main goal is simple. You want to create a measurable outcome in place for yourself, team or company within a specific time frame.
You wouldn’t want to create a target which is unreachable or over achieving it as well.
Without proper documentation and setting the bar, there is absolutely no way to monitor our progress in social. More importantly, we have no idea if our strategy is paying off especially when you are paying for advertising.
In this article, you will discover 3 powerful but simple ways to measure your social media marketing success.
3 Simple Ways To Measure Social Media Marketing Success
1. Measuring using Google Analytics
Google Analytics is powerful and it really surprised me that majority of us are not using it to its full potential.
Login to Google Analytics and head over to Acquisition > Social > Overview
After clicking the above, you will be able to see a summary report as below:
With this summary report, you will be able to see the snippet on which social media platform is providing the most referral traffic.
If you need a detailed report, click on the Full Report button on the far right.
From the report above, you can see that Pinterest is generating the longest stay on page traffic while Twitter is generating over 55% of my social traffic. With this information, you can easily modify your social strategy to boost traffic or the ROI for your social media success.
Note: You can even set the specific date for the report (in this example, I used report generated for the past few days).
2. Measuring using social shares on specific blogs
If the above method is just too long for you, no worries. There’s a quicker way to have a good idea of how your social media marketing is working out.
Let’s take the example from this post on Entrepreneur. Social shares help to generate a form of trust in the readers.
What will you feel or think when you see the above image? Over 10,000 shares on social media?
That’s insane, right?
That’s pretty much about it when it comes to measuring social media success. Most readers share an article because they find it useful and worth the read. This means that whatever you are doing, it is definitely working!
If you are using WordPress, make sure you are using social sharing plugins that automatically calculates the real figures of social shares. And if you have no idea which is the best social media plugin to use, stick to the social share feature on JetPack. You can’t go any wrong with that.
3. Are you using Klout?
According to the company, Klout helps people who want to be great at social media. Influencers are using it to measure their impact on social media.
Basically, the score range from 1 to 100 and the higher you score, the better your ranking is. On average, you should be anywhere between 75 to 100 to have a good ‘say’ and influence in the social world.
You can add multiple social media accounts into Klout and these will affect your score. Services you can integrate are:
- Google+
- Foursquare
Give it a few days to sync the information and you will get a score as below:
Klout also gives you a report on how each social account is performing. Here’s an example:
So, what does this contribution means to you?
Contributions are calculated based on numbers of:
- Shares
- Likes
- Comments or engagements
Here’s a question for you
Are you measuring your social media marketing success? If yes, tell us how you do it and what is the frequency of the measurement. See you in the comments below!
See also: 10 Tips For A Successful Social Media Campaign
