Social media can be a very effective marketing medium, but it can also be an incredible time sink for brands which focus on the wrong priorities. The main goals of your social media campaign should be increasing brand awareness and customer engagement. Follower counts and social shares can tell part of the story, but you may also want to monitor the following metrics for more significant insights.
Brand Search Volume
Search volume for brand terms is a crucial metric, yet a lot of brands somehow fail to keep track of it. There are a number of tools to measure brand search volume, but Google Trends and Google Insights are probably the most reliable and effective. Start using these tools to compare changes in search volume for your brand against changes to your competitors' volume. Doing so can give insight into your capability to engage customers on social sites, relative to your competitors.
Also on TechWyse
How to Build a Successful Social Media Marketing Funnel
New Facebook Metrics For Ads
Brand Sentiment
This is much more important when it comes to advertising and marketing, as negative customer sentiments can ruin your brand easily. Brand sentiment can be referred to as the emotion behind a brand. Is your brand well received? Is there positivity or negativity from your audience? When you measure brand sentiment, it allows you to further understand how people are feeling towards your brand. Tools such as Meltwater and Social Mention can help you evaluate the sentiment of the conversations encompassing your brand online, but what is just as significant is having a plan for how you will respond if you discover that your brand's image is not as pristine as you like. In addition to understanding your brand and campaigns, measuring brand sentiment allows you to find out how your brand is perceived in comparison to other competitors on the market.
To get ready for this frustrating risk, create internal docs dictating who's accountable for responding to unfavorable brand mentions, what your official business response will be & what sorts of recompense you are willing to offer unsatisfied customers.
Relevant and Good Quality Content
The driving force behind any effective SMM campaign is relevant and high-quality content, which matters to your viewers. Otherwise, you're posting content that can ruin your brand because they're not generating any conversation and engagement for you. Post content that your users are interested in or care about. Otherwise, you are just wasting your time. Use Google Analytics to measure the unique page views, total pages viewed, and time users spend on your content.
A greater number of unique page views signify that you are reaching more individuals, while time on page means your content is useful enough to hold the visitors attention. Finally, if you see a boost in total pages viewed, it could also mean that people prefer to learn more about your brand or what you've to offer.
Track Your Traffic
This is among the most powerful metrics for identifying what areas you should be concentrating your marketing efforts. You need to know which social sites are referring visitors your way. Once you've attained this information, you will be able to shift toward those sites and optimize your efforts to boost traffic.
To track your traffic, sign into your Google Analytics account, visit the Traffic Sources tab; simply click the Referring Sites option and type in every social network address. It will show you how many visitors are being referred from every platform.
Klout Score
Klout has become a hot tool for calculating social media engagement and it is one you will want to start utilizing right away to figure out whether your marketing campaigns are leading to better brand recognition or greater perceived authority. Tracking your Klout score will offer you a good indication of how efficiently you are engaging with your social media fans/followers, so it is a good metric to begin tracking today.
Obviously, these are just a few social media metrics you may use to track the return on your social media campaigns. Figure out which areas make the most sense for your business, set some goals and then evaluate your progress weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. By doing so, you will be better able to hone your efforts to accomplish continued success eventually.
