How Social Media Measurement Can Impact Your Campaigns
If you are a brand running a social media campaign, would you take the time to analyze its success? Most students tend to analyze their grade on an assignment to see how they can improve next time. Wouldn’t you expect brands to do the same thing with social media campaigns?
What is Social Media Measurement and Evaluation?
Social media measurement and evaluation is basically what it sounds like. Measuring and evaluating the effectiveness of your campaigns and looking at what worked and what didn’t work. Another way to put it: “measurement focuses on designating specific amounts that reflect change in specific objectives, whereas evaluation focuses on the assessment or value of certain actions in a campaign or strategy (Freberg, 2019).”
Having a measurement strategy for your brand is important. If you don’t know what to measure, how to measure, or how to interpret those results, then how will you be able to create and execute effective content?
What Can Measurement Help With
Social media measurement can help brands and social media professionals in numerous ways. One way measurement can be helpful is it shows “how social media fits into your business and which platform is most appropriate for your business objectives (Mossey, 2017).” Social media is meant to support your business obtain its overall objectives.
According to Freberg (2019), this strategy can better inform you about your audience and identify influencers who may be able to help you reach more people. Partnering with influencers can inform their audience of your existence, while drawing in new customers.
Having a better understanding of your audience and the social media channels you use, these metrics can influence how you execute your content. For instance, if engagement tends to go down after your third post of the day, then your brand should strive to post twice a day. You can also find out what times during the week is your audience most active.
Aside from knowing when the optimal time to post is, you can also learn what types of content your followers react best to. Maybe video content does very well as opposed to photos or flyers. Videos that are 2–3 minutes max may be better than 5–10 minute videos.
Lastly, “metrics keep you aware of general social profile and brand health — you don’t know the impact of your social media presence until you have the data to back it up (Kramer, 2012).” When people discover your account, does it present well and inform them of who you are.
Measurement and Evaluation Tools
Each social media platform has its own analytics and insights, oftentimes within the app when you establish a professional or business page. Here are just a few measurement and evaluation tools one can use:
- Sprout Social
- Hootsuite
- Google Analytics
- Export.ly
- RowFeeder
- TweetReach
- Facebook Insights
- Klout
- Mention
- Twitter Analytics
- Facebook Business Suite
Using a variety of tools can help you monitor and measure analytics across each platform you use. Some of these tools above are specific to certain platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter Analytics, whereas tools like Sprout Social and Hootsuite can observe multiple platforms at once.
Summary
Having a measurement strategy can greatly impact your future campaigns. Looking at the success of previous campaigns can let brands know what worked and what didn’t work in reaching their target audience or obtaining certain objectives. Having a sense of when and how to reach your audience can oftentimes impact your sales and the success of your business or brand. Make sure to take a look at your analytics before implementing your next campaign!
Sources and Additional Resources
Freberg, K. (2019). Social Media for Strategic Communication: Creative Strategies and Research-Based Applications. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-metrics/
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/why-measuring-social-media-matters
