Measuring Social Media Success

“If you don’t know where you want to go, it doesn’t matter which path you take.” Lewis Caroll’s words ring true universally in many spheres of life and industries of business.

When it comes to social media marketing, one of the most important steps is overlooked: writing a strategy. A social media strategy is like your roadmap to Eldorado (achieving your business and social media goals) with clear landmarks along the way (Key Performance Indicators) to track your progression. If you don’t have a strategy, you won’t be able to measure the success of your social media marketing.

How to set up social media goals

Your social media goals should be aligned with your business goals and support other avenues (in-store and online) to achieve the latter. For example, if your business goal is to increase revenue, you can use social media marketing to build brand awareness and send traffic to your website so that consumers can buy your products online.

Examples of social media goals include

• building brand awareness
• creating a trusting and reliable brand reputation
• building and managing a loyal online community
• using statistics to get to know your customers
• improving communication with your customers

By now, it goes without saying that these goals will also need to meet certain criteria. They need to be

• specific
• measurable
• attainable
• relevant to your business and
• timely

Once you know where you want to be, you need to establish Key Performance Indicators to track your position in relation to your ideal destination.

How to set up social media Key Performance Indicators

There are various social media metrics such as followers, post likes, shares, comments, and link clicks you can utilise to establish KPIs. The more precise your KPIs are, the better you will be able to measure social media success.

For example, if your business goal is to increase revenue by 10% in 6 months, your social media goal can be to increase website traffic by 30% to contribute to online sales. Therefore, for the following 6 months, you will need to calculate how many times your ads will need to be seen, and how many people you will need to reach to generate enough website traffic to contribute to your online sales.

Types of social media ad campaigns

With special reference to Facebook, there are various ad campaigns you can create to meet KPIs and social media goals, such as:

• Page like promotions to increase the number of followers
• Engagement campaigns to increase likes, reactions, shares and comments
• Traffic campaigns to optimise your ad for website clicks
• Video views
• Lead generation campaigns for newsletter subscriptions (for example) and many, more.

The success of your social media ad campaigns is dependent on your company’s lifecycle stage, where your consumers are in the buyer journey, and how you target the ads.

Tailored social media strategies

Social media strategies don’t follow a one-size-fits-all approach. At G2, we consider your unique brand holistically. All digital avenues (such as your website, social media channels, e-newsletters, Google Ads, etc.) are interdependent and interconnected within your digital ecosystem. From here, we consider your ideal consumers (a.k.a. buyer personas) and business goals to create a roadmap to help you dominate your digital space.

Our detailed social media strategies are based on data-driven predictions and results. Let’s chat! Contact us at info@g2design.co.za.