How to determine the effectiveness of social media marketing

As the business landscape becomes increasingly digital, 77% of businesses rely on social media as an integral part of their marketing strategy. Big name companies like Amazon have social media to promote products, highlight deals, and engage with audiences.

Social media marketing is a great way to drive sales for businesses, as Forbes notes that 76% of social media users have purchased something they saw on social media. An effective social media marketing strategy gives you a unique opportunity to represent your brand and drive traffic back to your business. The first step to maximizing your effectiveness with social media is understanding which social metrics drive success for your brand.

In this section, we’ll list and explain the metrics you should be focusing on to help measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing.

Your reach metric tells you how many people have viewed your content. It's an average of how many viewers saw your post or series of posts and of those averages who were followers versus non-followers. It’s important to try to reach a high percentage of non-followers because it helps you reach more people and expand your target audience.

While each looks at how many people saw the post, impressions track how many times someone saw the post. For example, if you were to see a post three times, your impressions metric would be three because you looked at it three times, while your reach metric would be considered one because you only count as one person. Impressions is a good metric to examine how popular a piece of content is and whether people are viewing the post multiple times. When the same person sees your content frequently, you are more likely to get that person to engage with the post. Your marketing team should analyze a post with a number of impressions to understand why it’s getting traction so that you can create similar content.

Engagement measures how often your audience performs any action with your content. How involved your audiences are with your posts can show how effective your brand campaigns are. Your consumers can engage with your posts in many ways, such as clicking, liking, sharing, commenting, or reposting. Tracking these engagement metrics can tell you which posts successfully connect with your target audiences. 

Measuring social media engagement can help you understand how your target audiences are responding to your content and can improve your marketing decision-making.

Lead generation refers to attracting consumers to your business and nurturing their interest with the end goal of generating sales. It’s about understanding your target audience so you can convert them from visitors to customers. You can track your lead generation by monitoring actions like clicks on links within social media posts that go to product or service pages and drive sales.

Your conversion rate is the percentage of leads that perform a desired action. You can calculate your conversion rate by dividing the total number of target actions by the number of visitors. For example, if 100 people visited your website from a link within a social media post, but only 20 of them resulted in a sale, the conversion rate of your post is 20%.

Analyzing lead generation and conversion rate metrics can help you determine which types of social media posts contribute most to sales or which audiences may be most inclined to convert. You can use data-driven insights to enhance your social media marketing efforts by creating content that’s most likely to drive results.

Customer retention and loyalty metrics are not as straightforward as other social media metrics because they involve spending more time communicating and listening to customers. There are many ways you can collect metrics that reflect your customer retention and loyalty, including:

• Net promoter scores (NPS): Your NPS will show how likely customers are to recommend your business to someone else. This might include submitting polls as posts or requesting feedback in comments and private messages on social media.

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): This measure of the degree to which customers are pleased with your offerings or their brand experience is collected through similar means as NPS.

• Retention Rate: The percentage of customers retained by the brand over time. This might involve looking at the percentage of users who continue to follow your accounts on social media.

• Churn Rate: The opposite of retention rate, which measures the percentage of users who stop using your offerings or leave the brand.

Your content will carry a message, and it's important to understand how your target audience is translating your message and its implications for your business. Brand health is a collection of social metrics that provide insight into the health of your organization. For example, tracking audience sentiment is an indicator of brand health. It reveals how people feel about your brand and compares their sentiment towards your offerings against your competitors.

One way to track this is through social listening, commonly mistaken for social monitoring. Social monitoring focuses on tracking mentions and responding to address customer inquiries or complaints. Meanwhile, social listening focuses on hearing and understanding consumers to uncover more complex thoughts and feelings about your brand, competitors, or the industry in general.

Understanding the sentiments of your target audience can help you implement strategies to better resonate with them in your social media marketing efforts. Gathering brand health data can be complicated and time-consuming, but social media management software can simplify the process through social media listening features, among other benefits.

Your ROI is a crucial metric for assessing the success of your social media marketing and how it aligns with your business objectives. You can find this out by comparing your costs to the revenue generated. To calculate social media ROI, you typically compare the financial gains, such as revenue generated from social media marketing, against the expenses incurred, like advertising spend and content creation costs.

A simple formula looks like this:

(value achieved - investment made) / investment made X 100 = social media ROI %

For example, consider posts that drive $10,000 in revenue but cost $2,000 from advertising and content creation costs. In this case, the ROI calculation would look like:

(10,000 - 2,000) / 2,000 x 100 = 400%

In this case, the ROI for the social media post was 400% which indicates it generated 400% more value than the resources invested in it. Tracking your ROI on social media content proves its value, and knowing which posts have the highest ROI can help you maximize profitability.

Understanding social media metrics is vital for seeing if you strategy is working and to what degree. These metrics provide the data you need to improve strengths and address weaknesses by adapting your social media marketing strategy.

Navigating the world of social media can be difficult, especially without the right tools. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, Khoros can simplify social media management. Our platform provides customizable metrics, configurable dashboards, along with social media monitoring and listening capabilities among other features.

Using Khoros’ social media management software is the easiest way to know if your social media marketing is working. Request a demo today to get started!