Measuring social media success

Step 1: Identify key metrics

Start by deciding which specific metrics you are going to track. These might include:

• Number of page followers or video views (and their demographics)
• Reach or impressions (organic and/or paid)
• Likes or subscribers
• Shares or mentions
• Top posts, mentions, and/or followers

Many social media platforms have built-in analytics tools (such as Facebook Insights in Business Manager, Twitter Analytics, or Instagram Insights) that give you most of these numbers for free. There are also social media monitoring and measuring tools available, usually for a fee.

Step 2: Benchmark to help set your goals

Setting goals is hard, but necessary. Create SMART goals, ones that are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

A good way to set your initial goals is by benchmarking, which means comparing your social media account to similar, competitor, and aspirational accounts. Ask yourself questions such as:

• Which social media channels are they on?
• How long have they had each account?
• How many followers/subscribers do they have?
• How many likes/shares/retweets/views does each of their last 10 or 15 posts have? What kinds of posts perform better than others?
• When was their last post on a specific channel? How often do they post?

Be sure to compare apples to apples by selecting appropriate peer accounts for benchmarking. For example, there’s no sense in comparing a newly created account for a Division III golf team with that of a long-established account for a Big Ten Conference football team.

Facebook’s Business Manager lets you see “Pages to Watch” so you can compare your page’s performance with similar ones. If you don’t have access to Business Manager or other native comparison tools, you might have to do your benchmarking manually.

Then, define what success looks like for you. It might include aiming to:

• Get 500 new fans this fiscal year
• Reach at least half of the total number of page followers with each Facebook post
• Hit at least 5% engagement or 5,000 impressions with each tweet

It’s tempting to skip the goal-setting stage in order to get right to posting content. But when it comes time to assessing your efforts, this step is crucial.

Step 3: Measure and evaluate

Once you’ve established what you’re measuring, you can use the native analytics tools (or third-party ones) to start viewing your key metrics.

We recommend regularly exporting the data into an Excel or Google spreadsheet for tracking and reporting purposes. This lets you review your data over time, which isn’t as easy to do in the native tools.

How often should you measure or report out? It depends on the metrics you’re looking at and how often you’re posting. Some metrics are worth reviewing daily, such as the performance of individual posts and content types. Others might make more sense to check on a monthly or annual basis (number of followers, for example) so you can track significant progress.

Once you have a critical mass of followers, it’s also worth accessing any of the available demographic information about them. Facebook Insights gives you the aggregate data about your fans’ and followers’ ages, genders, locations, and languages. Such information can prove useful in creating content that meets the needs of your users.

As with any data or measurements, you want to identify both general trends and specific anomalies in order to get a holistic picture of your results and takeaways.

Step 4: Use the results to inform your social media content strategy

Make decisions about what to post and when based on the measurements and your evaluation of them. Use the analytics to see what works for your audience, and then give them what they want while balancing those things with your institutional or departmental goals. It’s not an easy thing to do, which is why many places have dedicated staff just for social media.

Quick real-world example: Those of us managing the University’s Facebook account have almost entirely stopped posting about events happening on campus, unless those events have a Facebook Live component. We noticed that posts about events regularly got significantly less engagement than other types of posts. That’s because the page’s demographics skew heavily toward people not in the Rochester area. Turns out, these particular fans aren’t interested in hearing about Facebook events they can’t or won’t attend. So, we let the metrics guide our decision-making about what content to post to Facebook.

Level up your measurements

Want to take your social media measurements to the next level? With the right abilities and resources, you could undertake some A/B testing or randomized trials to experiment with the timing, text, headlines images, hashtags, tone, and more of your social media posts or advertising.