How do you measure the success of a social media strategy?
For a company or brand, it's essential to verify the effectiveness of its social media communication strategy. But when it comes to the specific question, "How do you measure the effectiveness of a social media strategy?", there isn't just one answer, but several. This is because the metrics used to measure the strategy's effectiveness depend closely on the objectives set beforehand. These objectives primarily focus on brand awareness, customer relationship quality, and business generated. To help brands verify the effectiveness of their social media strategy, our social media agency implements various key performance indicators (KPIs). Here's an overview of these key performance indicators and their associated objectives.
What are the social media KPIs to measure brand awareness?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics to monitor regularly to measure brand awareness. The main KPI involves assessing community size, i.e., identifying the number of followers/subscribers. Also called a vanity metric, it is only valuable when combined with other key indicators such as the number of impressions, mentions, mentionreach , , engagement, etc.
At So Bang, our team has a wide range of tools dedicated to deploying these various performance indicators. With regular reporting, it becomes easy to study follower growth and their interactions over time. In addition, with each new content publication (video, text, audio) or when setting up advertising campaigns (social adsexperts community management at the So Bang agency analyze the quantitative and qualitative results of followers: growth in the number of subscribers, analysis of positive or negative sentiment in comments, and the number of clicks on the website originating from social networks.
Often accessible on social media platforms, all these insights allow community managers to implement new campaigns or readjust their existing social media strategy based on the target audience. It's also always recommended to monitor the competition to see how results compare.
Indicators to also measure the quality of the customer relationship
More and more people are turning to brands' social media platforms to contact companies and resolve customer service issues or ask questions about using the products and services sold by the brand. As a result, companies must remain vigilant and ready to respond quickly to subscribers' questions. To be effective, this approach necessarily involves setting up a team of community managers. Entrusting social media management to a specialized social media agency is also a way to ensure optimal responsiveness.
In practice, many brands use instant messaging tools to optimize customer relations (chatbots, Messenger). It's clear that monitoring interactions between subscribers and the brand also contributes to the success of a social media strategy. This is why implementing a social media listening approach (social media monitoring) helps to capture exchanges between the brand's customers or prospects.
To measure the quality of this customer relationship, a brand also has every interest in adopting KPIs. This is a way for it to monitor the at any given time that exists between it and consumers
Here are some specific indicators that allow us to measure the quality of the customer relationship :
- Analyze the speed of the response time
- Implement customer satisfaction surveys
- Measuring reach (engagement) on social media
- Build customer loyalty by offering them specific deals on the platforms
What are the objectives for generating business through social media?
and Conversion rates sales rates are good indicators for measuring the impact of an advertising campaign or social media marketing activity. They are therefore the final objectives to track in determining the success of your digital strategy. Even though social selling on platforms like Facebook and Instagram is becoming increasingly popular among brands, it's conversions—that is, the completion of a specific action—that are most closely monitored.
Among the conversion goals to consider, here are the most significant for measuring your social media strategy:
- Subscribe to the newsletter
- Fill out a form
- Responding to satisfaction surveys
- Generating clicks on a website using social media platforms
Again, success varies depending on the industry you work in. You may also not always have reliable data on industry averages or your competitors in that area. However, you can always compare the success of your social media efforts to that of your other, more traditional advertising and marketing methods to see how social media compares.
Conclusion
Measuring the success of your social media strategy begins with defining performance indicators that align with your marketing objectives. Furthermore, there's no need to define a whole range of indicators across the board. You risk getting lost in a sea of numbers and losing sight of your business and commercial logic. Instead, focus on the most meaningful KPIs.
Of course, evaluating the success of a social media strategy takes time and requires considerable expertise. To be effective, this evaluation process often involves increasing marketing and communications staff. Some brands also prefer to outsource their social media management to a specialized social media agency like So Bang.
Thanks to our diverse digital expertise, our teams can support brands in measuring their social media performance. All the data we collect is presented effectively through dashboards that allow for real-time management of social media strategy, closely aligned with user trends and behaviors.