How to measure social media performance like a pro
If you’re a sole trader, small business or you just don’t have marketing resources, it’s easy to neglect reporting and analysis. For some, just doing the activity seems like enough - unfortunately it isn’t.
Producing social media content and not measuring performance and insights is like throwing balls in the air and hoping someone catches them. Of course there will be some traction, some leads and some sales - but there is also a smarter more efficient way to execute.
If you’re not in a position to integrate your platforms, or you don’t have the resources to build out a single-source of truth (which we can btw!) - these are 3 areas that we would look at in detail to improve your social media marketing efforts.
#1 A/B testing
This is an easy way to gauge what content does and doesn’t work for your audience. It’s so easy for marketers to “decide” what design, imagery and copy works best for the audience, but at the end of the day - it’s best if you get the audience to decide themselves.
Social media ad platforms such as LinkedIn Campaign Manager and Meta Ads Manager have testing capabilities, and there’s also tools like Google Optimize which you can use to determine what web pages are converting best. A/B tests are also super useful for changing things up - for example identifying what colours make people click on buttons more, or where a form should be on a page. The possibilities for testing are endless!
#2 CTRs and CVRs
Looking at your click-through and conversion rates seems an obvious area to look at performance. However, it’s important where you’re looking. For example if your social media CTR is good, but your website CVR is bad - the assumption would be that your social media content is performing well, and the website content isn’t. What does this mean?
Perhaps the messaging is different from what the audience is expecting. When looking at social media performance in particular, you need to measure performance all the way through to the last touch point - ie, what you want the lead to do on your website. It’s not good enough just to have good CVRs on your social platforms, it has to go all the way through to sale or form submission.
#3 Awareness and Acquisition
There are loads of metrics you could be measuring that fall under either the awareness or acquisition umbrellas. But it’s really about the goals that you’re looking to achieve which determines what metrics are best to measure. For example, if your primary goal on Facebook is to increase sales, then monitoring page likes alone won’t give you a good indication if your efforts are good or not.
Brand Awareness as a goal is complex. If you’re trying to increase brand awareness through social ads, it’s easy to become disheartened by low CTR or CVRs - but a good brand awareness campaign will also coincide with an increase in both organic and direct website traffic as brand recall increases. Acquisition metrics on the other hand are a little easier to measure - focusing on things like conversion rates and sales or lead count might be a good indication of what’s working.
At the end of the day to ensure you’re measuring your social media engagement and performance correctly, you need to first understand your goals and your audience. Once you know what you’re trying to achieve and who you’re trying to influence, you’ll find yourself in a better position to accurately measure the correct engagement metrics. And once you do that you can determine what is and isn’t working!
p.s. if you didn’t understand the acronyms above, give us a buzz - we can help you with that too!
Interested in improving your social media engagement metrics?
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