How to Measure Social Media Marketing Performance?
More and more businesses are jumping into social media marketing but only without any idea on what, how, and when to do something.
So all they are doing is making content and publishing it without getting any good result but becoming confused over it.
No more we say because in this article we will be showing how to measure social media marketing performance. With our guide and explanations, you will know from now on what you need to do and track.
We will share which key performance metrics you need to track to figure out how your marketing strategies are performing. So strap in and let’s get started.
What Are Social Media Marketing Performance Metrics?
If you are looking to learn how to measure social media marketing performance then you need to have a clear idea of what it is. Measuring social media marketing performance is only possible once you start keeping track of the SMM metrics.
These performance metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are what you need to pay attention to the most. The most common ones are:
Engagement Metrics: Things such as likes, comments, and shares are called engagement metrics. They show how much your target audience is liking your posts.
Reach and Impressions: Reach is about how many people are seeing your content while impression is about how often your content is displayed. This metric is all about your brand or business exposure.
Follower Growth: Follower growth is simply what it says it is. It indicates how many followers you are gaining over a certain time. The higher this number is the better you are at converting your audience.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): CTR measures the percentage of people who click on a link or call to action in your posts. A high CTR indicates that your content is compelling and relevant to your audience.
Cost-per-Click (CPC): CPC measures how much it costs you each time someone clicks on your ads or posts. It helps you understand the efficiency of your advertising spend.
Conversion Rates: The conversion rate measures the percentage of people who are making a purchase or subscribing to your business. It measures your SMM effectiveness.
Amplification Rate: The amplification rate measures the ratio of shares to total engagements on your content. It indicates how effectively your audience is helping to deliver your messages to a wider audience.
ROI (Return on Investment): ROI isn’t strictly a social media marketing performance metric, but it does help show how profitable your strategies are.
Why Are Social Media Marketing Performance Metrics Important?
There is a clear reason why you should learn to measure social media marketing performance. In fact, there are multiple reasons. Along with indicating how successful your marketing strategies are, these performance metrics provide many other insights and benefits. Here are some of them:
Measuring Success: Performance metrics help a business understand more clearly how well their efforts are working. They help businesses gauge which strategies are working and which aren’t.
Informing Decision-Making: Certain performance metrics provide helpful insights that can help with decision-making. These metrics can help businesses make decisions for content creation and ad targeting for more effective results.
Demonstrating ROI: Social media marketing requires significant funds and time. Performance metrics can more easily demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of SMM to justify the investment of time and resources to stakeholders.
Identifying Areas for Improvement: Certain metrics can highlight areas in need of improvement in your marketing strategies. They can also indicate what improvements are needed and how much.
Benchmarking Against Competitors: Finally, performance metrics also benchmark a business's effort against other competitors and industry standards. Engagement rates, follower growth, conversion rates, and such indicate how well you are doing compared to your competitors.
How to Measure Social Media Marketing Performance?
To measure social media marketing performance, you need to follow certain steps since you will need to keep an eye out in many directions. Here is our clear-cut guide to measuring SMM performance:
Set Clear Goals
The first step to measuring social media marketing performance is setting clear and achievable goals. The goals you set must align with your business missions and objectives. Common goals businesses set are increasing brand awareness, website traffic, leads, and such.
Track Metrics
Once you have set clear goals, you need to start to track performance metrics such as likes, comments, shares, ROI, and such. You should only track metrics that will help you to measure your marketing performance. Don’t try to track everything because that will only confuse you.
Monitor Amplification Rate
One key performance metric that you should track always is the amplification rate. As we mentioned above, this rate is the ratio of share to total engagement with your social profile. The higher the amplification rate, the more it indicates your audience likes your content and is sharing it. Monitoring this metric will help you to determine which content your audience likes and share more.
Track Your Impressions
Another key performance metric you should track to measure social media marketing performance is impressions. By tracking this metric you will gain a lot more insight about your brand visibility and exposure.
Evaluate Follower Growth
You need to keep a close eye out for your social media follower growth. This metric will help you know when and why your follower count is increasing or decreasing. The changes in the growth will help you narrow down the causes so that you can more easily refine your marketing strategies.
Measure Click-through Rate (CTR)
CTR measures the percentage of people who click on a link or call to action in your posts. A high CTR indicates that your content is interesting and relevant to your audience, prompting them to take action. By measuring CTR, you can assess the effectiveness of your content and optimize your call-to-action strategies for better engagement.
Monitor Cost-per-Click (CPC)
CPC measures how much it costs you each time someone clicks on your ads or posts. Monitoring cost-per-click helps you understand the efficiency of your ad spending and optimize your budget allocation for maximum ROI. By keeping CPC in check, you can ensure that you're getting the most value for your advertising dollars.
Assess Conversion Rates
Conversion rate measures the rate of people who take a desired action, like completing a purchase or subscribing up for a newsletter, after interacting with your content. Tracking this metric allows you to evaluate your social media campaign effectiveness in driving meaningful actions and generating tangible results for your business.
Evaluate Your Competitors' Activity
A key step in measuring social media marketing performance is tracking your competitors and their activity. You will need to constantly measure your performance with your competitors so that you know if you are doing better than them. Also, by benchmarking your performance, you can gain valuable insights that will further benefit you down the line.
Analyze the Insights & Calculate Your ROI
Lastly, you need to analyze the insights you have taken from social media analytic tools and use them to measure your ROI. This metric will clarify just how profitable your social media marketing strategy has been.
The insights will also help you with making changes to your marketing plans in the future to ensure better results.
Conclusion
To measure social media marketing performance, you need to be clear about performance metrics and what they mean. There are many such metrics but we have shared the key ones that any and all businesses must keep track of.
These metrics will ensure that you can get the right insights that will help you measure your business success. The process of measuring your performance is pretty straightforward if you know what you need to track.