According to Pew Research, 72% of Americans use at least one form of social media, making it an attractive way for companies to reach key stakeholders including consumers, clients, and current and potential employees. However, it can be difficult to determine the return on investment for the work required to regularly post content, gain followers and grow a network.
Tracking and measuring your social media results can help determining if your investment is paying off. It can also help you discover trends and ascertain what content is most helpful in achieving a company’s goals. By working smarter and with a targeted approach, the response from your audience will justify the investment per post.
If you don’t already have goals and metrics in mind, I recommend considering metrics in each of the following four categories to quantify and measure: reach, interaction, conversions and defining features.
- Reach is the number of people that see a specific post as well as your audience in general. This includes the reach, views, or impressions of individual posts, as well as your follower count. This data is helpful in tracking growth and determining how often people see a post.
- Interaction is the amount, quality and type of feedback you get on a post. This includes likes, comments, sharing, tagging and mentions. This is helpful to gauge the percentage of your audience who are reacting to your content and sharing it to their audience.
- Conversions are the times that someone sees your post and it inspires them to visit other content, such as your website, a blog post, other social media handles, or an article. This is an important metric category as it indicates that your post was appealing enough to motivate someone to leave the social media platform to view that content. For consumer goods, this can directly lead to sales
- Defining features are elements that differentiate one post from another. Qualitative data like text content, emotive quality, theme and quantitative data like post length, time posted, and what type of post it is (text, image, video, link) can also be helpful to track and analyze.
There are many ways to track social media activity, including services like Hootsuite, SocialTracker, Sprout Social and more. But these tools are not vital. You can create an Excel workbook to manually track and analyze key data. How frequently you log data depends somewhat on how much time you can consistently dedicate to tracking your social media, but a good baseline frequency is every week, two weeks or once a month.
After collecting a couple weeks of data, consider setting SMART goals for your social media program. These goals are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time bound. Consider the following:
- Specific goals are free from ambiguity. Make sure to clarify the steps you’ll take, how you’ll track progress and measure success, and when you’ll re-evaluate.
- Measurable reminds us to set goals based on quantifiable data or calculable markers for qualifiable data. Make sure you have access to any statistics on which you base your goals. It is ideal to set goals where you can ascertain by measuring whether they were achieved or not.
- Actionable ensures that there are methods defined that will lead to the achievement of your goals. Without actionable steps that you or others can take, these are not goals, but hopes.
- Realistic urges you to set goals that are practical. This often means you need to consider where you are now. One way to set more realistic goals is to frame them in averages or percentages rather than distinct counts.
- Time-bound is the establishment of the period in which your goal will be achieved. It is the appointed date when you plan on analyzing and evaluating your progress.
Once you’ve succeeded in achieving your goals, weigh the amount of effort it took to complete this task against the results and determine any changes you’d make moving forward. If you fail to achieve your goals, you have an opportunity to learn. Were your actions flawed? Was your goal too ambitious?
Setting goals and regularly evaluating your progress can be a rewarding and fulfilling way to approach social media management and help communicate the value of social media to interested parties.