When you’re representing a brand or company on social media, measuring the actual success of your efforts can be a little harder than just measuring “metrics.” Every marketer must decide for themselves just what parameters they will be using to measure their progress and assess necessary changes to their strategy to improve these results.

 

Finding the Right Metrics

 

The metrics that will give you the most benefit depend entirely on your specific goals. Are you reaching for more brand awareness or conversions? Are you going for more community engagement or link clicks?

For example, if its awareness you’re going for, then you could use metrics like volume, reach, impressions, etc. to measure your payoff.

[See Also: Understanding Engagement: Reach vs. Impressions]

On the other hand, if your goal is to gain new followers, who may act as your brand ambassadors, then you can track which of your current followers are both actively engaged and have a high degree of influence with followers of their own.

Not sure how to set the right goals? Click here.

 

Checking Your Engagement

 

When it comes to measuring engagement, you should focus more on audience participation—the number of retweets, replies, comments, shares, etc. While this should not be the whole equation, checking your engagement levels and seeing how many people share and like your posts is a good start to measuring your success. Look at your comments to see if they are actual, meaningful additions to the conversations, as opposed to other marketers advertising through your content. Figure out what your audience likes, and what they’re complaining about. It’s all about adapting and improving in order to keep your page fresh and engaging.

 

Driving Traffic On Your Site

 

To measure how successful you are at driving traffic back to your website, you can track URL shares in posts, the number of link clicks, and what they do on your site. What pages are people most interested in? What pages have the highest bounce rate? How do they move through your site? If you’re receiving a good amount of engagement, but your site isn’t experiencing any of your conversions, something is wrong. If this happens, change up your strategy. Otherwise, continue monitoring your traffic and look through the data to determine how much traffic your site is really getting. If your social media page is helping you get an influx of potential customers, make sure your site is prepared for that much traffic with an appropriate web hosting plan.

 

What Happens If You Fail?

 

What happens if your conversions are not what you wanted? Do you go back to the drawing board? Do you scrap the idea as a whole? There’s always a reason why your page is not doing as well as you’d hope. Look back at your stats and determine where you’re going wrong. Sometimes social media takes a couple of tries before it works for you. Here’s a list of  5 tools that can make your job as a social media marketer a little bit easier.

 

How To Improve Your Weaknesses

 

So as it turns out, measuring your success on social media has less to with the number of followers you have, and more with cultivating an active, engaged audience.

In order to shore up your shortcomings, using the right tools is essential. Even when you’re sifting through data, make sure you’re using the platform’s tools to understand your audience. If you want to temporarily bolster some traffic, try to attract users through contests and other small events that cost nothing for the customer, with a prize at the end. Rather than making them pay money, have them pay through engagement. If your content is rich and your brand is likable, your social media ventures can go a long way.