So, you're all set up to launch your first campaign through social media, of course hoping it will go viral. But what if it doesn't rack up ten billion hits in the next few days - is it a total loss? Of course not! You can still evaluate the effort and get important insights into the actual results.
Here's a starter guide with 7 metrics for your social media campaign to keep an eye on, divided into two main parts: the Users and You. Cause no matter how perfectly picked our target audience is, a campaign won't gain traction if it's delivered in a sub-optimal way. The four first metrics can help you decide if you have to delve deep into the latter three or just keep them as checkpoints. As not all of these can be collected via Google Analytics, there's an upcoming post where we'll also list a few tools that can help with the data gathering for social media metrics.
The users: Do you reach your target audience?
1. Users gained
A metric to see how many users were compelled by the campaign. This is a two step thing, though: first to set up a baseline of how many users who follow your accounts (or channels) and also how many you usually gain an average week.
2. Users lost
This is similar to Users gained, but deals with possible fallout. An attempt at figuring out just how many users were so disinterested by the campaign that they stopped following the campaign channel. Both this and the gained user metric are helpful for determining which parts of the campaign that were the most successful and which parts that should be avoided in upcoming campaigns.
3. Active users
An engagement metric checking how many took part in the commenting and sharing of the campaign. This is a metric that in some ways overlap the users gained, but the issue here is to find out the engagement and, by extension, how far reaching the campaign was.
4. Traffic from channel to target page
Here you measure how much traffic that comes from each of the channels you choose to launch in, whether it's
Facebook,
Google+ or
Twitter, and does it go to your intended campaign target. With a measurement on this you can easily see which channel is suitable for what message.
You: Are you doing what you should?
5. Content produced
A measurement of how many campaign relevant posts etc you have made. This can give insights on how many or few posts it takes until your target audience starts to react.
6. Conversations held
One thing sometimes forgotten is that social media is built on interactions. This metric is mainly as a checkpoint to see if you have interacted with your intended audience. A more fuzzy measurement is if you've interacted in an
appreciated way.
7. Time spent
Quite simply a measure of how much time you are putting in the time required to produce the content needed. Do you spend enough or even too much?
That's it?
As you can see, this is just the beginning, an inspiration if you so will, but it's a beginning that will take you some steps towards your goal. So, what do you think - are these metrics to start with?