How can we measure success?

Gauging your success in social media marketing may seem daunting, at first. However, with the development of social media metrics, analyzing how far your platforms have come has become much easier over the years. In my own experience, I’ve explored quite a few social media marketing tools to help me define and analyze these metrics. Yet, each metric applies to different aspects of creating a “successful” social media platform. 

Take this for example – Let’s say you want to discover – “Who is my audience?”.

For this question, you will have to examine the social media metric sentiment. Sentiment is what people think about your brand based on social conversations surrounding your content. It’s very important for a brand to have a positive impact on its audience and by understanding which groups are positively reacting to your content, you can understand who your consistent audience is. Another metric that can help with this question is evaluating growth. Growth rate is how fast your follower count grows. It’s important to keep track of this in regards to defining your audience because it allows you to see who your followers are and if there are any influencers. Knowing which influencers follow you can help you reach an even larger audience by possibly hitting their fans as well. 

Another question – “Am I doing better than my competitors?” 

This can be answered using the metric engagement. Engagement measures the number of likes, comments, followers, private messages you get and more on your content. This will help you understand how your audience is reacting to your content and you can compare it to competitors as well. The more engagement you have on your content, the better. 

“What are people saying about my brand?” 

This is best answered with sentiment, as mentioned before. Sentiment can be broken down into a net sentiment score and a brand passion index which can help you understand how people feel about your brand compared to your competitors as well. 

“When is the best time to publish?”

The metric Reach keeps track of the number of people who see each post. If the reach is consistently higher at a certain time of the day, this will reflect in the analytics and show you the best time to reach the most people. Additionally, impressions also measure the total number of times a post was seen. 

“Which content does my audience enjoy the most?” 

Content will be an important metric in determining this question because content evaluates the number of posts and the type of posts that do the best for your platform. Engagement will also help to see which posts are getting the most attention and interactions. The more interactions a post gets, the more attention it has grabbed from people because it has caused them to not only look at the post, but like it, share their opinion on it, share it with others and more. 

“Which social media network is the best for my brand?”

Engagement is likely the best for this because you can see the difference in the interactions with the same post on different platforms. This will make it easier to see where you have a larger audience and where your post is getting more attention. For example, at my job, we know that Facebook is the best social media network for us because that’s where we get the most interactions on our posts. 

“How can I have a better performance on social media?” 

It would be smart to take a look at the sentiment metric for this question to see what people are saying about your content. Although its always ideal to take comments with a grain of salt, its important to understand your audience’s opinions so you can continue to serve them in ways that will help you. Additionally, I would take a look at reach so you can see when the best time to post is and what type of content tends to do the best. 

Overall, each of these metrics are very helpful in identifying successful and unsuccessful approaches to your brand’s social media marketing. Social media marketing is always changing, but by adopting these analysis techniques, you can understand how people consume content and the directions that can go in the future.