How to Measure Social Media Campaigns to Get the Best Insights?

Reporting your marketing campaigns is vital not only so your C-suite can see the results, but also to take notes and improve in the future. Today we will focus on how to measure a social media campaign so you can get the best insights. I’ll show you the crucial metrics to track and the tools to do so. Let’s go!

Which metrics do you want to measure? It’s tempting to focus on the total number of likes, comments, and shares, but social media analytics are much more than that.

The goal of analytics is to identify the right metrics to track. You need to analyse numbers that will give you unique insights into your strategy that will give you a competitive advantage.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way! Measuring the results of your campaign is not that difficult after all. All you need the right attitude, a basic understanding of social media analytics and a little help from some social media management tools.

Here’s what’s ahead of us today:

Social media metrics you need to track

Tools to measure social media campaign

How to measure social media campaign in four steps?

Why measuring social media is important?

Why measuring social media is difficult?

Can you measure social media?

Social media metrics you need to track

Which metrics will determine the success of your social media campaign? To correctly measure the results of your social media campaigns you need to track important social media metrics. It’s best to start before you launch your campaign to have benchmark numbers and see the impact of your work.

Not all of the metrics will apply to your case, so make sure to chose the right ones that will bring you the most insights.

The volume of mentions

The volume of mentions will tell you how many times your keyword or hashtag was used online. The more frequently the name of your brand, product, service, or your branded hashtag has been used, the more brand awareness your campaign has generated.

Sentiment

The volume of mentions won’t tell you the whole story. You have to take a look at the social media sentiment analysis as well.

Sentiment analysis will help you assess the right context of your social media campaign. Taking a closer look at the sentiment, you will know how people feel about your campaign. Do they like what they see? Or are your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter posts a huge miss?

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Analysing the sentiment will help you assess the results of the campaign and spot the content that sparks positive engagement.

Social media reach

The reach indicates how many people could have seen your post. It’s a basic metric when you want to assess your brand awareness and measure your social media performance in terms of how many people see your efforts.

Social media reach is calculated by taking into account unique people who have seen your post. If the person shares your content, the algorithm takes into account the number of their followers.

Social media reach provides you with important data about your campaign. I would argue that reach is much more important metric than impressions. Impressions will tell you how many times your posts were seen. But this number can be pumped up by bots or small number of people.

Post reach, although much harder to calculate, gives you more accurate and insightful numbers.

Top public profiles

Many analytics tools will analyse the the public profiles talking about your brand or product. The tools will calculate the social share of voice and influence based on the number of people following those accounts and the reach of their posts.

That is a goldmine of knowledge of you want to run an influencer marketing campaign. If you want to reach brand new audience, create new content, or expand your social media presence beyond Facebook or any other social media network.

The share of voice

The share of voice is an important part of your social media measurements. This metric will tell you what part of the whole online talk was initiated by your profile. In other words, the share of voice is the measure of your reputation.

The higher your share of voice, the more trust people have in your brand. That translates directly into more engagement, impressions, and number of unique followers.

A high share of voice can have a positive impact on your business metrics. People tend to buy from brands they are familiar with, so the more they hear about you, the bigger the chance they will choose your product.

Follower growth

Although follower growth is by many considered a vanity metric, I think you should track it. At least for a reference.

If your audience likes the post they are seeing, they will not only leave comments and likes under the posts, they will share the content as well. That is the easiest way to organically grow you followers base.

Tools to measure social media campaign

Measuring the effects of social media campaigns is easy if you have the right tools.

Different tools on the market will help you track the effects of your social media campaign. I’d like to recommend one of Buffer’s top social media monitoring tools, Brand24.

Brand24 will provide all the necessary data to evaluate and improve your social media campaign. And it’s easy to use!

It all starts by creating a project. In the project creation wizard enter the keywords you’d like to track. If you want to measure brand awareness enter the name of your company or the name of a specific product.

Start measuring social media campaign results

Brand24 is also a great tool to measure hashtag performance across different social media channels, for example, Instagram or Twitter. All you have to do is enter your branded hashtag as a keyword.

Once you created a project, you can further narrow down the search when you go to the Project Settings tab. It works like a Boolean search so that you can add a required keyword or excluded results containing certain keywords.

You can easily export the result of your social media campaign to a customisable PDF report. PDF reports are a great way to show the results of your work to your supervisor or C-suite. You can choose the segments you would like to include in your report.

The reports are fully customisable, which means you can not only add the analytics parts you want to share, but also choose your brand colours and add a logo.

Measuring social media campaign with social media monitoring tool

The metrics you’d like to see are in the Analysis tab.

You can set the date range so that it will suit your needs. Once you do that, the world of social media metrics is your oyster!

Brand24 will show the total number of results, the estimated social media reach, social media interactions, and a number of positive and negative mentions.

Measure your social media campaign!

What’s more, you can easily filter the data to find social media influencers talking about your product. All you have to do is choose the most popular authors and then filter the results according to the social media platform you’d like to analyse.

Brand24 will also show you the influence of social media authors together with the share of voice and their influence.

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Moreover, it’s a great tool for ongoing monitoring of your brand reputation. By collecting all the mentions with the name of your brand or product, you can spot the social media crises before they escalate.

How to measure social media campaign in four steps

We’ve established that measuring social media campaign is no easy task, but it’s not impossible! The key to tackling complex problems is to divide them into smaller chunks and to approach methodically.

There are two types of social media campaigns analytics:

• on-going analytics – monitoring your everyday activities over time to spot seasonal changes, and spikes in your engagement rates
• campaign metrics – metrics related to tracking the impact of specific campaigns you’re running

So without further ado, let’s see how to track the effectiveness of your social media campaign!

1. Set your goals

That should be the start of every marketing campaign – what exactly do you want to achieve with your campaign? Reach a wider audience? Increase brand awareness? Drive traffic to your website?

There are different social media metrics you should follow to assess all of these results.

What’s an example of an achievable social media goal? Increasing your Twitter engagement rate by 25% within the next quarter. It’s a great goal because it’s a SMART goal. The acronym stands for:

• Specific – we have a specific platform we will be working on
• Measurable – there’s a clearly defined metric you could track
• Actionable – the goal is realistic and possible to accomplish
• Relevant – increased engagement rate will result in better brand awareness
• Time-bound – we clearly indicated when the goal would be achieved.

2. Choose the right metrics

Let’s take a look at different metrics and how can they help you measure social media campaign:

• The volume of mentions – it’s the total number of mentions containing the keyword for a specific campaign. For example, if you run a social media campaign on Instagram or Twitter, it will show all the public posts that used the hashtag. It will show how far your message has spread.
• Influencer score – it will show you who is talking about you and what impact do they have. Directly correlated with influencer score is:
• The share of voice – a percentage point showing what amount of social media conversation was generated by a particular social media post
• Social media post reach – this metric tells you how many people have seen your post
• Posts with the positive and negative sentiment – this social media metric characterises users’ attitude towards your content. It can be positive, negative or neutral.

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The right metrics will provide valuable insights that will help you evaluate your efforts and implement more accurate social media marketing solutions next time.

3. Measure social media campaign

Now, it’s time to measure the results of your social media campaign.

The raw data won’t tell you much. You need benchmarks or other information to know how you perform compared to your competitors. It will also help your stakeholders understand how your business is doing.

While creating a social media report, try to present the data in the form of graphs and charts. It’s much easier to comprehend the effects of a social media campaign when the data is visualised.

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Keep your graphs simple. The topic of social media metrics is complicated enough; you don’t need to confuse it any more with unnecessary pie charts.

4. Adapt and repeat

When you’re done with these three steps, the only thing left to do is to draw conclusions from your results and adapt your metrics to the new campaign.

There’s always a room for improvement, so try to tweak it a bit now and then.

Putting the effort on social media presence and analyses will eventually show the return on investment. Social media is a valuable source of leads, traffic to your website, and a way to increase brand awareness.

Why measuring social media is important?

Measuring the effectiveness of social media campaigns is essential.

Measuring your social activities will tell you which marketing areas are a success, which aren’t, and which need improvement.

The problem is, that it’s hard to establish the right metrics to follow. Follower growth and the number of likes are considered vanity metrics by many. Analysing vanity metrics won’t help you understand your social media presence, nor will it help you improve your social channels. A robust analytics will help you learn about your target audience, prepare content with high engagement metrics, and increase posts impressions.

Your management won’t be impressed by the number of hearts or emoji comments under your Instagram post. Instead, they are interested in social media ROI and increased brand awareness.

Thankfully, there are ways to present cohesive and informative measurements of your social media activities, that will show the significance of running a social media campaign and clearly state a social media ROI.

Why measuring social media is difficult?

The same thing that makes social media so exciting also makes it hard to measure. All the platforms are constantly changing, introducing new features, updating algorithms and policies. That means a tactic that worked one month might need some extensive twitching the next.

You need to make sure you track the essential metrics daily, as the changes may affect your day-to-day online presence. If you see a drop in metrics like engagement rate, total number of impressions, or social media reach, you might want to examine the matter further.

That’s why measuring your social media performance is vital. Not only to justify your social media spending to your upper management but also to provide data to optimise your future campaigns. If you monitor your results for an extended period, you will be able to spot seasonal changes and adjust your social media marketing strategy accordingly.

The second problem with measuring social media are the metrics. The metrics that are easy to count, like followers growth or the number of likes, don’t tell us a lot about social media ROI.

The metrics that are important, for example, social media engagement, influencer score, the share of voice, or social media reach are hard to calculate without the help of some additional tools.

Can you measure social media?

Yes, you can, and it’s not as hard as it seems! All you need is a strategic approach and a little help from an external tool. Track the numbers generated by Facebook post, or content on Twitter and Instagram and you will find a ton if insights that will help you reach new audience and stay one step ahead of your competitors.

Measuring your results should be your top priority. It will allow you to be a better social media strategist and will allow your management to see how much ROI social media strategy can bring.

Just choose the right tool and start tracking your social media performance ASAP. Be the best in your field!

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