Measuring Social Media Success

For social media marketers, setting and hitting goals can be tough, but there are a few proven ways for them to track progress.

The return on investment (ROI) for social media usually isn’t clear, and sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr are often used to simply promote brand awareness.

Companies must take three important steps to determine social media marketing success. These are establishing goals and baselines upfront and then tracking the efforts afterwards, according to Dynamic Business‘ Anna Cairo.

Before beginning a campaign, Cairo says marketers need to determine their goals. These goals might include the need to “reach a specific demographic, get more reviews, increase brand awareness or sell more products,” she said.

The goals must be tangible and each step must be broken down as much as possible. Otherwise, she said, “it will be impossible to effectively measure what you are doing.”

Baselines are standards against which results will be measured to determine whether goals have been met, Cairo said. Perhaps a local business hopes to reach 100,000 Twitter followers or 5,000 likes on Facebook to ultimately sell more items. If marketers know where they want to go and why, it will be easier to figure out if they’ve reached their mark.

Cairo points out that by using free tools such as Facebook Insights, Google Analytics and WordPress stats, marketers can see where they are on their road map. LinkedIn also offers a tracking tool that is useful for B2B marketers.

Social media may not be the ultimate answer for ROI, but it will remain a crucial resource for marketers to use for promotional purposes.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles/shutterstock