Measuring Your Social Media Success

When it comes to a successful social media campaign or account it is important to measure your success. There are a few steps you can take to successfully measure the analytics of your account or campaign to figure out what works and what doesn't, for you specifically. With that information you can improve your campaign to fit with what works best. Social media apps today have built in analytic tools that can help you throughout the process.

Source: Social Media Examiner

According to Jenn Deering Davis, there are two types of social media measurement: ongoing analytics, and campaign focused metrics. Ongoing analytics tracks activity over time and helps keep up with the general conversation surrounding your brand. The campaign focused metrics is to help you understand your target marketing initiatives depending on your goals and objectives for the actual campaign.

Before going on to track your analytics, it is important to remember that a lot of followers or subscribers, doesn't necessarily make a successful social media, its all about engagement which is why measuring your analytics is important. In other words, you can have an account with one million followers, but only get a few thousand retweets, likes, replies, etc. Or you can have an account with two thousand followers and get one thousand retweets, likes, replies, etc., that means that at least half of your audience is engaging with what you post.

You should also set goals, or objectives for each campaign that you are running. This way when you start to measure your success, you can see what works better for the direction that you want to go in. For example, if you're running a social media account and you post a lot of articles, and when you look at your analytics you notice that when you post articles about sports they do really well, but posts about world news aren't doing so well. You may want to stick to posting about sports because they're getting you the most engagement which will help your social media presence grow and become more successful. Its always important to know your audience and know who you're trying to reach as well. If you're analytics are showing that your followers are big on sports, it may help to cater to those people because they want to see what you're posting.

At the end of the day, measuring your success on social media is potentially what can make or break you, or your campaign. For a campaign sake, if your first campaign doesn't do so well, it is still important to measure it at the end so you can see where it went wrong and make improvements either along the way or for your next campaign.