Social media is an affordable marketing tool, but you need to show the results. Here are some ways to measure successful social media campaigns.
Framework for measuring
Companies can’t measure social media success without knowing their business objectives. In order to measure, align your social media key performance indicators with business objectives. Some business objectives could include increasing revenue, gaining leads, creating brand awareness and improving customer experience.
Tools for measuring
There are many free and paid services for companies to use. Here are a few:
- Twitter offers analytics to measure engagement, impressions and follower growth/demographics to help boost a brand’s impact on the social platform.
- Facebook insights provide information about a brand’s Facebook page performance and demographic data.
- Iconosquare, a third party application, helps companies manage and grow their brand on Instagram.
- Sprout Social is a paid social media management tool to help companies grow their business and focus on engagement.
- Topsy, a social search and analytics website, allows companies to search by time and location, set alerts and analyze the sentiment of tweets.
How to tie it together?
The key to successful campaigns is driving traffic back to your website. Google analytics can be a powerful tool.
- Install Google analytics on your website.
- Track campaigns using Google’s URL builder. Add parameters to a URL to track campaign measurement and monitor the campaigns in Google analytics.
- Build a Google dashboard in analytics by monitoring metrics through a collection of widgets.
- Create an advanced segment in Google analytics to compare your social data to your overall data.
-Tina Keller is a senior communications specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
