Analyzing the success of your social media campaign is a key step in increasing your audience over time.  It gives you the chance – and the information you need – to improve, enhance and refine your messaging.  Your audience is your best resource for knowing what worked well and what didn’t work well.  This gold mine of information is being given to you freely by your audience, and with a little sweat equity added to the data (ie., your own effort in pulling out lessons to be learned), you can effectively identifying areas for improvement in your promotional processes, and ultimately, to your overall objectives.

This article highlights some key metrics and methods you can use to help differentiate yourself and maximize your promotional time and effort.

Capture Basic Engagement Metrics

• The most basic way to begin is by tracking Likes, Shares, and Comments.  These metrics indicate how well your content resonated with your audience, with increasing importance for each.  Higher engagement suggests that your content is interesting and relevant.  Even if you get trolls (who can say some very unfortunate things), that can be seen as a hallmark of your success in reaching a wide audience of people you don’t know, or didn’t know before (because for sure, you don’t have any friends who would make nasty trolling comments!). 
• Click-Through Rate (CTR):   It’s not just about getting Likes, but also attracting people to your online world.  Measure the percentage of people who clicked on a link in your post. A higher CTR indicates that your content was compelling enough to drive traffic to your platform or commercial offer.  What is a typical CTR to expect?  Around 1 or 2%.  Spam email may get one-tenth of that.  Nonetheless, with an engaging campaign message and a focus on personalized attention to your audience, you can effectively increase these metrics and generate a small volume of high-value customers (more about this in future articles).

Focus on Reach and Impressions

• Your social media reach is the number of unique users who saw your content. It shows how effectively your content is being distributed to a broad audience – as opposed to how many individuals will click your content, which is conveyed by…
• Impressions, which is the total number of times your content was displayed. It gives you an idea of the overall exposure your campaign received.

Track a Steady Growth of Followers

• Monitor the growth in your social media followers. This metric is especially important if you are undertaking a planned social media campaign that may be coordinated across several different platforms or accounts. 
• Everyone aspires to the “viral posting” that gets distributed to millions of people.  If that happens, enjoy the great success, but consider it a bonus.  Keep the consistency going, because that is what pays off in the long run.
• Clicks to website is also key to measure how many users clicked through your social media to visit your website.  This information will be the basis for you to…

Monitor Conversions

• If your promotional goal is to drive specific actions (e.g., sign-ups, purchases), you will be able to track the percentage of users who completed the targeted action as a percentage of the CTR/impressions, giving you an indication of your messaging effectiveness.  This metric also forms the basis of more sophisticated analysis, and enables you to undertake A/B analysis (later in this article). 

Referral Traffic

• Where posting on social media may be a direct way to reach your audience, referrals will be crucial to helping you build that audience.  Website analytics tools (e.g., Google Analytics) will be needed to enable tracking of the amount of traffic coming from your social media channels.

Hashtag Performance

• Hashtags are an easy and effective way to extend your reach.  Track these as their own category.  Know your hashtags and those of your audience.  Test different ones to see their impact.  Hashtags with a large volume of users are not necessarily better.  Aim for the niche. 

Time and Day Analysis

• Analyze when your posts received the most engagement. This can help you optimize your posting schedule for future campaigns.  (Another upcoming topic:  how to determine a good time for posting)

Audience Demographics

• Understand the demographics of the users who engaged with your campaign.  Not to generalize or stereotype, but your content will attract people with similar traits and characteristics.  These may be demographic in nature, or otherwise, you can identify activity or personality-based characteristics.  Look for surprises, ie., people you didn’t expect would be interested in your content, then understand why they are interested.  This type of analysis can open up a whole new world of possibilities for content and monetizable offers, particularly if you have found an active niche, where you are filling a gap in demand that nobody else has found. 

Sentiment Analysis

• Understanding sentiment takes your audience analysis a step further than mere demographics.  While the data is essential, the art will be in generating a storyline about why your audience feels the way they do. 
• How to monitor sentiment itself is an art.  Analyze the types of comments that people make, and the way people say things.  It is a more subtle and subjective analysis, but over time and with enough data points, you will begin to recognize patterns in mood and feeling among your audience.  Have you hit a sore spot with the audience?  Is there a problem they are expressing, that you can solve?  Are they excited or motivated by what you say?  These questions are the nuts and bolts of a sentiment analysis, and understanding the answers can help to open new possibilities for marketing and monetization.

ROI (Return on Investment)

• Go as far as you can with free promotional strategies.  If you are tired of waiting for organic results, then lay down your credit card and give your account a boost.  If you had a budget for the campaign, measure the ROI by comparing the costs incurred with the benefits generated, such as increased sales, leads, or brand exposure.  No need for advanced math skills, just divide profit over cost. 

A/B Testing

• For advanced promotional strategies, A/B testing is absolutely essential.  How do you know what is the most effective message for your audience?  You don’t have to guess.  If you tried different approaches within your campaign, such as different ad creatives or post formats, compare their performance to determine which strategies were more effective.

Feedback and Surveys

• Sometimes there is no need to be clever.  Just ask!  Collect feedback from your audience through surveys or direct messages.  Look for qualitative data can provide insights into your audience’s sentiment and to understand how well your campaign was perceived.

By analyzing these metrics and methods, you can gain a comprehensive view of your social media campaign’s success and make informed decisions for future campaigns. The specific metrics you focus on should align with your campaign objectives.

Following last month’s article on keeping things simple for the beginning promoter, there are some “next level” (but still simple and easy) steps that can enhance a campaign’s effectiveness and improve your overall results in social media promotions. 

Here is the next level.

Plan a Content Calendar

• Create a content calendar to schedule when and what type of content will be posted. Write a list of headlines (or topics) that you will address.  Develop this content ahead of time, and keep to the posting schedule.  Consistency is key in maintaining audience engagement. Include a mix of promotional, educational, entertaining, and interactive content.
• This step is most crucial over the long run.  The game is not just about attracting likes and followers, but also moving ahead of your competitors.  They are already ahead of you (because you’re just starting out), but they have distractions in their lives as well.  If you are more consistent than they are, over time, YOU WILL WIN.

Add Hashtags

• Keep that content spreading.  Include relevant hashtags into your posts. This can help your content reach a wider audience and improve discoverability among a like-minded audience.

Engagement and Interaction

• Show a personal touch!  This step is relatively easy when your audience is small.  In fact, when your audience is small is the most effective time to get personal.  Therefore, you can set aside some time to respond to comments, messages, and mentions. Engage with your audience through conversations, polls, contests, and Q&A sessions. Building relationships is essential for a successful campaign.
• What if there is nobody to engage with?  Get out there and engage with other people on other platforms, and respond to other posts.  This activity will generate curiosity on the part of other people about what you’re doing.  If other people are following effective promotion practices (and many are), they will also want to engage with you.  Their engagement brings attention to your content.  The snowball begins to roll.

Visuals

• That’s just to say, keep things interesting.  Visual content tends to perform well on social media. Use eye-catching images, videos, and graphics that align with your brand and message.  Create your own, or you can subscribe to sites (some with a fee) from which you can use readily available images and videos.

Budget

• Is this a business or a hobby?  What business doesn’t have a marketing budget?  Determine how much you’re willing to spend on your campaign. This could include costs for content creation, advertising, influencer collaborations, and any other promotional activities.
• Depending on your budget, paid social media ads can effectively extend your campaign’s reach. Platforms often provide detailed targeting options to reach your desired audience.  This option can be effective after you have laid the groundwork with some existing content and a small audience already in hand.

Measure and Analyze

• Regularly monitor your campaign’s performance.  The easiest way is to count the views and the likes.  Comments that other people make, however, are probably the best indication of the level of engagement that you inspire.  To post a comment, someone has to think about what you’ve published and craft a response.  The brainpower they have engaged to do that indicates that you’ve touched them somehow (hopefully positively). 
• Ignore the trolls.  Even if you see the occasional troll – they can be mean and nasty – no need to get hung up on that.  Trolls don’t waste their time, they like to troll sites where they think others will see their comments.  A troll is an indication that someone sees you and your online presence as something worth trolling about.  You can see that as an amazing and satisfying milestone to have reached.  If you don’t get any trolls, you might worry and wonder why nobody is paying attention to you.
• Learn about your audience through analytics tools provided by the social media platforms or third-party tools. Track metrics such as engagement, reach, clicks, conversions, and more.

Adjust and Optimize

• Learn Learn Learn:  Based on the data collected, make necessary adjustments to your campaign strategy. This might involve tweaking content, targeting, or posting schedule to achieve better results.
• Always be learning!  At the end of your campaign, compare the results against your initial goals. Analyze what worked well and what could be improved, and apply these insights to future campaigns.

Even simple promotional efforts require some level of planning and attention to detail. Each step contributes to the overall success of your social media marketing efforts. 

If you think this plan of action is easy and simple enough, then wait, there’s more good news:  the more you do it, the easier it becomes.