How to Measure the Success of a Social Media Campaign

How to Use Social Media to Market Your Business

Learn the fundamentals of social media marketing with our free, comprehensive guide.

Measuring the success of a social media campaign largely depends on the goals of your social media campaign – what do you want to achieve from it, and how can you measure it?

Metrics to measure the success of a social media campaign

Dependent on the objectives and desired outcomes of your campaign, you can calculate and compare the success of your social media campaign by looking at the engagement, follower growth, awareness and reach, leads, conversions, and website traffic.

Measuring social media engagement

If your social media campaign goal is to generate interaction and increase your social media engagement rates, take all social media content from your campaign and calculate your engagement rate like so:

1. If your social media campaign is organic: take the total number of interactions your content received, and divide by your total number of followers, and then multiply by 100%.

2. If your campaign was paid social media advertising: take the total number of interactions your content received, and divide by your total number of views, and then multiply by 100%. (This is because a paid social media advertising campaign will be seen by online users who do not follow you)

Social media interactions are classed as anything that generates activity from a social media user – such as likes, reactions, comments, shares, or saves.

Benchmark engagement rate across most channels is 1%+, but if social media engagement was your goal, then you can also look at your usual engagement rates and measure the uplift your social campaign achieved.
You can break this down by individual social media channel so you can determine which platforms your social media campaign was most well-received on, and you can also go a step further and categorise by content piece, so you can understand which content piece from your campaign was the most successful in generating engagement (and then create similar killer content for future campaigns).

Measuring website traffic

If the desired outcome of your social media campaign was to drive traffic to your website, you can view how many clicks your campaign generated by looking at your social media insight tools and metrics, using Google Analytics or any third-party tracking software you have implemented.

Compare the traffic from each social media channel you utilised for your social media campaign and have a look at the overall increase in website traffic your social media campaign has generated since it began.

Key website traffic analytics include:
• Clicks
• Click-through-rate
• Bounce rate (if your bounce rate has increased since your social media campaign, this could indicate that you’re driving through the wrong audience, or your social content doesn’t correspond with your landing page, or your website is performing poorly)

If you’re going to run a campaign to drive website clicks, having a retargeting campaign alongside this is a cracking way to keep driving your visitors back to your website and keep your company at the forefront of their minds (this is how you lead your prospects down the consumer journey funnel).

Measuring follower growth

If the objective of your campaign was to grow your audience and increase social media profile visits and followers, a paid-for promotion or social media advertising campaign will have the insights you need detailing how many followers a piece of content acquired.

However, if your campaign was organic, you can analyse its impact on your follower growth rate by comparing your average follower growth rate across a time period without your campaign, to your follower growth rate during your social media campaign.

To calculate your follower growth rate, use the following formula:

Take the number of followers you gained over the course of your campaign, divide by the number of followers you started with, and multiply by 100%. This is your follower growth rate (within a chosen time period).

Measuring brand awareness increase

If the goal of your social media campaign was to boost your brand awareness and build your presence, you should look at the following metrics from during your campaign and compare them to before your campaign:

• Reach
• Impressions
• Views

If there is an uplift, then you can pat yourself on the back.

Measuring leads and conversions

All marketing campaigns should have conversion and lead tracking implemented, so you can see how many sales or business prospects your campaign produced.

Perhaps you set up conversion tracking on your website, or you want to view them within third-party tracking software or in your social media insights and data.

Conversions could be measured through:
• Bookings
• Enquiries
• Direct messages/emails
• Phone calls
• Sales
• Registrations
• Subscriptions
• Downloads
• Donations
• Installs

You can only measure leads and conversions if you have conversion tracking set up.

To deem a campaign’s success, compare your conversion figures from your social media campaign with the conversion data before it began.

You can read more about understanding social media analytics for improved success here:

3 reasons why you need to pay attention to analytics

Social media marketing and analytics

We can help you with your paid social media campaigns, among a host of other digital marketing services. Why not contact us today to see how we can help you achieve your marketing goals?
 

How to Use Social Media to Market Your Business

Learn the fundamentals of social media marketing with our free, comprehensive guide.