How do I measure the effectiveness of my social media campaigns?

You should always be able to measure the success of your social media campaign, if your business has one. While you may want to primarily measure to gather metrics, you should also measure your campaign's activity to learn more about what is working and what needs certain changes in your campaign.

The Two Main Ways to Measure Social Media

There are two types of social media measurement, including ongoing analytics—monitoring that tracks activity over periods of time—and campaign-focused metrics, which are campaign or event analytics with a set start and finish.

Ongoing analytics are needed for keeping up with all of the conversations regarding your company and brand. Once brand tracking is in place, you can let it run autonomously and check in from time to time to see how it's performing.

Campaign-focused metrics will help you understand what kind of impact your targeted marketing initiatives are having, varying from campaign to campaign based on your goals.

There are several ways to get the most out of these measurements.

Make Clear Social Media Goals

Prior to performing analytics and measuring all of your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram posts and feedback, consider what exactly you want to accomplish with social media. When considering social media channels for your brand, you should determine if they're right for you based on your goals.

Create Relevant Metrics and Measure Them Properly

Apart from setting realistic goals for your campaign, you should make sure you have the right metrics in place to measure the various aspects of it. For instance, if you want to measure awareness, use metrics such as volume, reach, amplification, and exposure. Use retweets, comments, participants, and replies to measure engagement. If more traffic is a goal, try to track URL clicks, shares, and conversions.

Once you have clear metrics in place, you can then use various tools to measure, monitor, and report on them to determine if you're meeting your goals.

After you've measured them, it's time to determine how effective your strategies are and tweak them accordingly.