Running a social media campaign can be challenging. This is especially the case if you aren’t sure how to properly measure your success. Luckily, there are a few data points that have a little bit more weight than others. And these are the ones you should focus on. Let’s examine seven metrics that every Singapore marketer should pay close attention to when running their campaign.
Mentions and Inbound Links
A great way to find out if the right people are discovering you is to monitor your posts. Pay attention to how much your posts are being shared. Is your follower base growing? Do you notice that there are a lot of people mentioning you? Are people tagging you? If people are actively responding to your post, then it’s a sign that your reach is also growing.
Conversely, if you notice that people are barely mentioning your brand and are not sharing your post, then it could mean that your content is not resonating with them. It’s also possible that you are targeting the wrong audience. And in this case, it’s a good idea to run some split tests with the audience before promoting a post. Sure, every industry is different, but you should expect to be mentioned. If you have mentions but your follower base is small, then you should consider executing growth strategies.
It’s also important to monitor inbound links as well. This shows you how much people are linking back to your site. Whenever someone links back to you, it builds towards discoverability and authority. There are several third-party tools available, such as Google Search Console.
Audience Interaction
When someone likes, comments, shares, retweets, or forwards content to a friend, it is a sign that they are engaged. If you want to get a better idea of how engaged people are, then you can examine the traffic that you’re getting from social media in your Google Analytics account. Simply select ‘Acquisition,’ ‘All Traffic,’ and then ‘Channels.’ In order to see the full report, make sure that your dimension is set to ‘Social.’
This report what show you which social media platform has the best performance and is the best source of traffic. It will also give you an idea of what type of content is best for your audience. In this way, you can focus on what matters most.
Influencer Marketing
If you want to ensure that your content gets maximum exposure, then you should reach out to an influencer. These individuals are seen as experts in your industry and their large following is likely to be interested in what you have to say. You may allow the influencer to try your product or service for free and in return, they can agree to mention your brand or give a review of your product.
The best approach for this particular strategy is to look for influencers that give their audience the most value. Use tools like Buzzsumo, Traackr, and GroupHigh to find valuable content and maintain the relationships that you form with these individuals. Also, use UTM codes that are unique to each influencer so that you can find out which drives the most traffic.
Audience Surveys and Net Promoter Score
Have you ever wondered what your audience things about your brand and content in general? Perhaps they feel positive about what you offer. Maybe they think that your content could use an improvement. Well, there is a great way to find out what type of reputation your brand has developed. It’s called a net promoter score, or NPS.
Your NPS gives you the ability to gauge what impression the audience has of you. You can calculate this score by taking a simple survey. Ask your customers how likely that are to recommend you to one of their colleagues or friends. Offer a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 representing, ‘Very Likely.’ There are also tools like Mention, that can give you a deeper look into customer sentiment.
Once you have an idea of how your customers feel about you, you can investigate further. Create more surveys for each social media platform and find out what aspects of your business they think could be improved. It’s important that you give each network its own survey as each has a different type of audience and standard.
Internal Engagement
There are many Singapore businesses that only focus on what their customers think. This is extremely important. However, you should also consider how engaged your team is as well. And that’s because the more engaged your staff is, the more likely it is that they will be able to engage your customers and follower base.
Tools like Dynamic Signal can help you to figure out how passionate your employees are about the content that you share. You can also use it to measure your company’s spending against all of your goals and KPIs.
Conversions
Another important metrics to help improve your social media marketing is the number of conversions you earn through your social media channels. If you want to find out if your efforts are actually paying off, then you need figure out how many people are actually converting. Depending on your specific goals, conversions may mean registration, subscription, downloads, and etc. One of the best ways to determine this information is to use your Google Analytics account. Visit the ‘Social’ tab and selection ‘Conversion.’
ROI
Another important metric to keep a close eye on is your return on investment, or ROI. Sure, you want your followers to convert, but what most business owners need to pay attention to is how many sales they have generated. Also, what is the actual cost per lead? If you want to know which of your campaigns are paying off, then you need to set up UTM URLs for every specific action.
The best way to find out if a lead came from one social media source is to use an attribution model that is single-touch. You need to know what was the lead’s first and last interaction with you. The best way to find out if a lead came from multiple social media sources is to use an attribution model that is multi-touch.
Audience interaction, influencer marketing, promoter score, internal engagement, and audience surveys are shell descriptions of categorise of metrics that you should monitor. However, to get even better results from your social media marketing campaigns, you need to go deeper and organize the metrics based on several factors.
The social media customer journey comprises four stages, and each has its specific metrics that you should monitor to get a clear perspective of your campaign’s performance. The stages are.
Stage 1: Awareness
Awareness refers to the popularity and visibility of your brand on a social media platform. It shows the current and potential audience you can reach through proper marketing strategies.
Stage 2: Engagement
Engagement refers to how the target audience interacts with the posts and videos you publish on the platforms.
Stage 3: Conversion
The conversion stage has metrics that illuminate your content’s ability to generate sales or encourage the audience to take any other desired action.
Step 4: Customer
The customer stage has metrics that give an idea of how the active or loyal customers perceive the brand products or services.
Let’s shift gears and look at the metrics of each stage to help accurately gauge the performance of your marketing campaign.
Awareness Metrics
As mentioned earlier, these metrics evaluate the popularity and visibility of the brand on a particular social media platform.
- Brand Awareness
Simply put, brand awareness is the attention that the business gets from the target audience on different platforms.
For the analysis, it’s recommendable to narrow it down to a specific period. For instance, you can evaluate brand awareness after restructuring your campaign to post more video content instead of text-based posts.
First, you need to list down the attention metrics that matter to your business and campaign, then decide the reporting period.
- Audience Growth Rate
It’s every marketer’s goal is to have many followers who are genuinely interested in the brand. Audience growth rate measures the number of followers that the business gets within a given period. It also gauges the rate or speed at which new followers join the dedicated page or start following the company’s profile.
Below is the formula for calculating growth rate percentage.
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- Post Reach
If no one or very few people view your post, your social media campaign will be in limbo. Post reach metric helps avoid such a scenario by giving you an insight on the number of people who come across a post, be it a video link or link to a blog post.
Unlike the two previous metrics, post reach is significantly influenced by the new post that goes live. Posts made when most of the audience online have a high reach percentage compared to those that go live when the audience is offline.
Here is the formula for accurately calculating post reach on any social media platform.
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- Potential Reach
This metric is closely related to post reach. The only difference is that it focuses on the number of followers who could have seen the post during a particular reporting period. Monitoring this metric is important to any marketer, as the campaign’s primary goal is to increase the clientele base.
Ideally, the potential reach is estimated to be 2% – 5% of your total theoretical audience reach on a platform.
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- Social Share of Voice (SSoV)
Social Share of Voice is arguably one of the most overlooked social media campaign metrics that most marketers don’t track. It measures the number of people who mention the brand name on social media.
The mention can be direct (where the follower tags the brand) or indirect (where the followers mention the brand name with no tag). This metric will help you determine how visible and relevant your brand is to the market when doing competitor analysis.
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The following engagement metrics will help you know how the target audience interacts with your content. Use the results to fine-tune your campaign for spurring engagement.
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Applause Rate
Applause rate is the total number of approval actions such as likes and favourites that a post gets relative to the total number of followers on the platform.
Ideally, when someone likes or marks a post as a favourite, they find the content valuable. Monitoring this metric will let you know the percentage of followers who value your content. If a particular form of content gets a high applause rate, consider creating more of it to increase engagement.
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Average Engagement Rate
The average engagement rate is the number of engagement actions that a particular post attracts, such as comments, shares, and likes. It is calculated relative to the total number of followers, likes the applause rate.
A high engagement rate means the content is relatable to most people and vice versa.
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Amplification Rate
Amplification rate is the ratio of shares a new post gets compared to the total followers. It’s also defined as the rate at which your social media followers share your content on their profiles or networks.
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Virality Rate
All marketers wish that their posts go viral on Twitter, Facebook, or other social media sites. Virality rate gauges the number of followers who share a post relative to the total number of impressions or unique views in a given period.
Suppose an article accrues 20,000 likes but has a vitality of 0.2% while another piece gets 10,000 likes and a vitality rate of 14%. In that case, the latter is more suitable and relatable to the target audience.
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Conversion Metrics
Increasing conversion rate from social media traffic should be at the top of your list of goals. Here are the metrics you should monitor.
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Conversion Rate
This is probably not the first time you have come across this metric. Conversion rate is the number of people who take the desired action after seeing and interacting with your post. It’s calculated relative to the total number of page visitors or post viewers.
A high conversion rate means the content is compelling, and the target audience finds it valuable. It’s recommendable to use a Hootsuite URL shortener tool to create a CTA with a trackable link.
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Note that traffic and conversion rates are mutually exclusive. The traffic can be low, but the conversion rate is high and vice versa.
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Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate (CTR) is the number of people who click on links in the posts or the CTA. Please don’t confuse this metric with the shares, links, and comments. CTR primarily focuses on the people who click on the link to get additional content, such as to read a new blog post published on your website.
Monitoring CTR will help you know how compelling your content or offer is to the audience.
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Bounce Rate
Bounce rate helps determine the quality of social media traffic. It is compared with ROI (return on investment) from other traffic sources.
For example, traffic from an Instagram post vs. traffic from organic Google search.
When doing social media marketing or running any other digital marketing campaign, you should strive to lower bounce rates and increase conversion rates.
If the social media campaign bounce rate is lower than the traffic from other sources, the campaign is working. The content and offers resonate with the audience. That’s why they click the links to visit your website.
Google Analytics is the ideal tool for tracking bounce rate. Log in to your account, and under the “Acquisition” tab, select “All Traffic” then “Channels.”
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Click on the bounce rate option to see a list of the channels, from those with a high bounce rate to the lowest.
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Strive to continuously enhance the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaigns to influence the growth of your company positively.
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Cost-per-Click (CPC)
As the name suggests, CPC refers to the amount you pay per click on a sponsored post or ad. When advertising on social media, you should focus more on CPC than the total expenditure. This metric will help you know if your investment is efficient in achieving positive or wasteful results.
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Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
Cost per Thousand Impressions is the amount you pay after 1,000 people scroll past the sponsored ad or post.
Unlike CPC, CPM does not always drive action. It only results in views and impressions. Use it to do an A/B test for new content formats.
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Social Media Conversion Rate
Social media conversion rate is a percentage of the total number of conversions from social media platforms. Use it to gauge effective of each post to generate sales or encourage the audience to take action. Use a trackable URL for the CTA button to monitor the conversions each post gets.
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Conversation Rate
The comment section is a good source of ideas for your next blog posts. You will also get insights into the customer’s pain points to enhance the quality of your products/services.
Conversation rate is the ratio of comments on each post relative to the number of followers you have on the monitored platform.
This metric will help you know the percentage of followers who are compelled enough by the content to share their opinions in the comment section. Hootsuite Analytics is one of the few social media monitoring tools that track this metric.
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Customer Metrics
This is the final stage in the buyer’s journey, and it gives insights into the perception of the active customers.
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Customer Testimonials
Customer testimonials refer to reviews, endorsements, comments, interviews, or assessments of the brand’s product/service. It could also be a review of the brand in general, such as the quality of customer service.
If the product offers value for money, the customers will be happy to share the experience with others.
Many sincere testimonials on social media will significantly boost your brand’s credibility, trust, and competitiveness. Here are three tips on how to get more customer reviews.
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- Request satisfied customers to write a review. Never compensate or offer an incentive, lest you undermine your professionalism and credibility.
- Structure the social media campaign to encourage customers to create either written or video reviews of your brand’s products or services.
- Make it easy for the customers to submit a review by synchronising the campaign with your Google My Business profile.
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Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
Customer satisfaction score focuses on how happy or contended the customers are with your service or product.
Go ahead and request the customers’ rate how satisfied they are with the product or service rendered on a linear scale. The scale can either be sentimental (poor, fair, good, great, excellent) or numerical (say 1-10), with 10 being the highest satisfaction score and 1 the lowest.
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Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net promoter score gauges customer loyalty. It’s ideal for predicting future customer engagement. You can use a question such as, “How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend?”
You can also use a linear scale to gauge their responses.
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- Detractors: 0 – 6 score range
- Passives: 7 – 8 score range
- Promoters: 9 – 10 score range
The report can help you predict future sales and make the necessary plans, such as increasing inventory.
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Final Thoughts
The above social media marketing performance metrics will give you a clearer campaign perspective. We recommend monitoring the reports every couple of weeks to know if you are headed in the right direction.
Desist from just focussing on one or two metrics, as the results may be skewed and not truly reflective of the campaign’s performance. Also, the reporting period shouldn’t be too soon after implementing changes to the campaign. Give the preferred monitoring tool ample time to gather enough data to generate a report.
Get in touch with MediaOne Marketing for the best social media marketing services. Our team is conversant with all the metrics discussed in the article and will help you make the right decision every step of the way.
