Social media could be very interesting and exciting but as exciting as it is, it could be very challenging too simply because of the constant change in how it works. On a regular basis, several social media platforms release new features which sometimes are new opportunities to explore but when there is a change in policies/terms of use or there is an algorithm update that affects how we target and reach out to new people, it becomes really challenging. Therefore, the key to properly harness the benefits of social media campaigns on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. is to leverage on data.
What is usually our most priority when we run campaigns is measuring the results. The challenge lies in how to figure out the most important metrics to set up or look out for. Don’t even tell me it is just as simple as the number of likes you get on your campaign. In this write-up, we will examine some important metrics we believe you should prioritize based on the campaign types, either paid campaigns or organic campaigns:
Organic Promotions
Reach vs Impressions:
The number of real people that come in contact with a post is called reach while the amount of time the campaign post was seen is called “Impression”. Take for instance, if a person sees your post three times, that is one (person) reach but it has three (views) impressions. So, if your intention for making a post is to get it in front of as many people as possible in a particular number of times, then, your metric to look at will be reached. However, if your goal for a campaign or post is to create robust brand awareness for your audience, then you might want to consider looking out for impressions.
Link clicks:
Facebook Insight will always give you the overall amount of clicks you get on every post but you can narrow it down to knowing the specific links that were clicked, this is so important because clicks on links are what helps you to see the real engagement. It is an insight that shows you how much your audience is interested in your content and by the time they click on the link to your website, tracking continues again, you will get to know what they do and what not.
Platform engagement:
Engagement here means how much people are interacting with your posts. On Instagram, you might want to look at likes, shares, saves, follows, and comments. On Facebook, you might look at likes, comments,s, and shares. On Twitter, you might look at retweets, comments, and likes. These engagement metrics can actually give us insights into what content your audience is interacting with the most and what interest them.
Paid Ads
Conversions:
Conversions could either be in form of book sales, newsletter subscriptions, signing up for an event, or e-commerce purchase, but you must carefully choose your conversion goal when you are creating your ad campaign. This is how you will be able to measure your return on investment, which of course is the most important. For you to be able to track this or for Facebook conversion ads to properly function, you will need to install Facebook Pixels on your website. This pixel has the capacity to track every user journey that finds its way from Facebook down to the “thank you for purchase” page on your website. Facebook pixels track every digital path.
Conversions could sometimes be simpler than installing Facebook pixel on your website. Lead generation form on LinkedIn could be set as a goal for your content campaign which will direct interested individuals to your page and have them interact with your products and hereby generating leads for your business. So, regardless of whatever product you are selling on social media, your campaigns should be trackable so as to measure your ROI at the end of the day.
Button clicks:
Call to action buttons such as “Contact Us”, “Read More”, “Learn More” etc. are often found on all social media platforms especially when you want to run your campaigns. These buttons are what give your prospects directions on what next step to take after they might have interacted with your campaign.
With button clicks, it brings in more conversion than link clicks which we have previously examined here. When you get button clicks, it’s only telling you that these people are interested in your products or services and are more willing to convert to customers, so it’s really an important metric you should always watch out for.
Relevance score:
Relevance score is usually between 1 to 10, this is the most proper way to see the effectiveness of your campaign on Facebook. It enables you with optimizing your campaigns and also assist you to know how the pairing of your content creation is fairing.
To put the effectiveness of this method to test, you will definitely have to set up a Facebook ad campaign in two different ad-sets, they will all have the same designs or creatives but each will individually be targeting specifically different audiences. Gaining insights into the audience that relates more with the content and that is deemed the most appropriate for your goal based on the relevancy score each of the ad sets receives is the utmost priority here. With this data, you can then start to target the audience that has the highest relevancy score from the two different ads set and, roll out again, different creatives against each other for the same audience (with the highest relevancy score) to achieve the best reach. You don’t have to start speculating about what audience, creatives, or strategy might work most efficiently and effectively when you can just work with the data.
Let’s conclude by saying, social media is very measurable and it has a whole lot of benefit to your business. There are so many more metrics to use, and that you can so much leverage on data to ensure the improvement of your subsequent campaigns.
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