Do you know how to measure social media effectiveness?
After all, you need to spend time on social media sites.
How do you know if you’re getting back a strong return on your time invested (ROI)?
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Flipboard, Reddit, Pinterest…: The list goes on.
You need to be where you experience positive results.
After reading this post, you won’t have to play the game Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe to choose your social media sites any longer.
When you plan your social media promotion, you need to make smart goals.
This post shares expert opinions on which social media tools and methods give you the best results for your time.
The experts provide data that offers empirical evidence that the tools are effective.
Do you know how to measure social media effectiveness?
If you don’t, you will by the time you are done reading this post.
This post covers how to measure social media effectiveness with the following free and paid tools:
- IGBlade
- Later
- Link.in bio
- Facebook Ad Manager
- Gravity Forms
- Kissmetrics
- Twitter Grader
- Facebook Grader
- Facebook Insights
- YouTube Insights
- Twitter Analytics
- Hootsuite
- Sprout Social
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Ahrefs
- Bit.ly
- Social Media Dashboards
- Tweetdeck
- Buffer
- Tailwind
Let’s get started.
I asked the respondents:
What tools or methods do you use to track your social media ROI? Why do you prefer these tools or methods?
“Key metrics we look out for are
- Page Likes
- Video Plays
- Link Clicks
- Content Shares
- Event RSVPs
- Brand Mentions
- Website Conversions
- Engagement
With these metrics in mind, some amazing tools that we use to track performance are IGBlade and Later.
IGBlade gives daily weekly, and monthly social metric reports letting you keep track of how your accounts are performing and which posts are driving engagement.
IGBlade is great with its monthly updates for each account you are tracking.
And the best part… IGBlade is FREE!
Later is a social media planning platform allowing you to easily sync multiple social media accounts in one hub.
Later has amazing performance tracking and an easy hub to comment and engage followers.
Link.in bio is another amazing feature, it allows you to add a link in bio or tag products in Instagram posts to turn your feed into a clickable, optimized landing page.
[Host blogger’s comments: According to the developer’s website, Link.in bio is free.]You get valuable insights including clicks, page views, and sales from each post.
Some argue that social media ROI is impossible to track or correlate. This is simply not true anymore with third-party features like Linkin.bio. This “link in bio” is the clickable URL that visitors use to visit what you deem to be your most valuable online real-estate.
For some it’s a product page, for others it’s a landing page or “About Us” section.
With this tool, you can send users exactly where you want them too, and these tools have a lot of analytics tracking so you know exactly which posts are driving sales and conversions.
These tools are great for our agency and allow us to fully optimize a social strategy and track ROI for clients.
Companies will spend an estimated $8.5B worldwide this year on influencer marketing.
Below are some ideas on how influencers and brands can branch out and expand their social reach and value.
Influencer Texting: Instagram influencers (@GaryVee, @Davidmeltzer) and other accounts are adding a “text now” button to their profile.
This text capture feature allows influencers to directly text and to interact with their audience, capturing hundreds of thousands of phone numbers in the process.
Entrepreneur influencer David Meltzer texts his fans every day, sending inspiring messages to asking for questions to asking for his latest podcast guest.
Micro-Influencers: For more effective targeting, it is wiser for brands these days to reach out and build relationships with micro-influencers (users with only a few hundred-thousand followers).
Inflated engagement numbers by oftentimes entitled “macro-influencers” has lead brands to reconsider using big celebrity endorsements.
Followers are keen now on paid sponsorship and when a big influencer is simply hawking a product for the money.
With a smaller and more dedicated following, micro-influencers offer a more down to earth market base. These micro-influencers are viewed as more credible, not to mention much cheaper.
Attached are some images below of their metric tracking.“
Kyle Rosner, Production Director, 420Interactive
How to Calculate Social Media ROI:
“Great idea for a post! So many people post on social media without a clear strategy or no clue about their ROI and it causes A LOT of disappointment and wasted time.
Before I post anything or run any ads on social media, I first set clear goals of what I want from my social media campaigns.
For example, do I want to increase my brand awareness, get more likes, generate subscribers to my blog or sell my products and services?
Identifying your goals early will make you instantly think more strategically about your social media posts.
Here’s a quick case study of a recent Facebook campaign I ran.
Goal: Target dentists on Facebook and capture their emails to bring them into my sales funnel.
Tools used to track ROI: Facebook Ad manager and Gravity Forms for email capturing.
In order to achieve my goal, I first created a blog post about Dental SEO marketing because I knew this was something Dental Business owners would be interested in and it’s also a service I provide.
I used Facebook Ads to target Dentists and push them to read my free dental marketing guide. The Facebook Ads Manager Dashboard was used to measure the success of my campaign which at this stage was to get Dentists to read my blog article.
Using Facebook ads manager to measure how many dentists viewed my article!
Next, I wanted to capture their email so I used a simple email opt-in form at the top of the blog and used Gravity forms to measure the email subscriber count.
Email opt-in form used on my blog to capture emails.
Emails captured and brought into my sales funnel!
As you can see, I was able to effectively use social media to generate 38 targeted and valuable email subscribers at a cost of less than $200. I can now build relationships with these dentists and encourage them to hire me to help with their dental marketing efforts.”
Jonathan Gorham runs Engine Scout, a boutique SEO agency based in Melbourne, Australia. If you’d like to see his post used for this strategy, you can read the Dental SEO guide here.
Finance CEO on Measuring Social Media Effectiveness
“Decide on your goal. This is what you’ll be measuring. For example, you might make a goal to measure site traffic originating from social media clicks.
Monitor posts, follows, and clicks. Determine how many people are following you, but also how many of those followers are engaging with you or sharing your information again.
Find a tool that works best for you. Kissmetrics allows you to monitor visitors to your site, but also on an individual level what they’re doing on your site. It’s anonymous for them, but it’s data for you. You know what they’re doing while they’re here.”
Chane Steiner, CEO of Crediful – https://www.crediful.com/
How to Measure Social Media Effectiveness
“You can measure your social media effectiveness through ongoing analytics and campaign metrics. Ongoing analytics deals with the process of monitoring current operations and strategies.
While campaign focused metrics help you to understand the impact of social media initiatives, effective social media marketing ensures both parameters to yield productive results.
Ongoing analytics are usually used for checking with the overall performance of general conversation about your brand and company. Once your brand tracking is set up, you can use ongoing analytics regularly to see how everything is going.
Campaign-focused metrics vary from campaign to campaign, depending on your goals for each. An effective social media marketing campaign involves both ongoing and campaign-specific measurements.
You can use the online buzz system measurers. This involves a simple method of typing keywords and a real-time social media search, which will give you insights into your search engine ranking and social media grading. You can use Twitter Grader and Facebook Grader for this purpose.”
Contributor: Aqsa Tabassam and I am a Senior Growth Marketer at Brandnic.com.
How to Measure Social Media Effectiveness
“As a career digital marketing professional and owning my own measurable marketing agency since 2000, I have a few thoughts on effective social media measurement.
What tools or methods do you use to track your social media ROI?
Platform analytics (i.e. Facebook and YouTube Insights, Twitter Analytics, Hootsuite, SproutSocial, and Google Analytics (for referring traffic and conversions).”
Why do you prefer these tools or methods?
“A blended approach provides the most holistic view of your social media efforts.
The platforms have fairly robust analytics dashboards, but the views are limited to each platform and not the big picture.
For cross-platform views, particularly of reach, engagement and click data, we like third party platforms like HootSuite or SproutSocial.
From a conversion perspective, Google Analytics or equivalent site analytics platforms are essential.
For a majority of companies that rely on revenue, conversions originating from social media is the single most important metric.
Unfortunately, social media is not the most effective channel for generating revenue, versus paid and organic search, direct response, etc.
The secondary metrics we focus on measuring and influencing for our clients are engagement and reach or impressions, in order of importance.”
Kent Lewis Anvilmediainc.com
Measuring Social Media Effectiveness
Goals, Metrics, and Monitoring
“Social media marketing effectiveness weighs heavily on the goals you set.
Decide what you want to accomplish through social media and start there.
Create a list of goals you want to reach and tackle each one individually. Once you’ve set clear goals, create metrics to measure each one.
For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, then you should use metrics such as volume and reach.
If you want to drive more traffic to your website, use Google Analytics to track conversions and clicks. Clear goals will help you determine whether or not your social media marketing efforts are effective.
If you’re not seeing an increase in your metrics, adjust your strategy and repeat the process.”
Contributor: Stuart Leung https://breazy.com/
Measuring Social Media
“As a content marketing specialist at Best Company, it is important to track social media effectiveness so that we can try to traffic as many people as we can to our site and help the community.
In order to track social media ROI, we use Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Ahrefs.
We prefer these tools because they are easy to use and understand, they show through data and charts what exactly is going on with traffic and social media usage.
Specifically, Google Search Console allows you to see to the exact date, what is being seen and how many people are clicking on and viewing pages.
Google Analytics lets you specifically see what social media is being viewed at specific parts of the day and where it is coming from. Ahrefs lets you know what keywords and SEO tips help and are working to bring more traffic to your page.”
[Related: Ahrefs Tutorial]
Contributor: Lindsey Marx, Marketing Content Strategist, BestCompany.com
How to Measure Social Media Effectiveness
“Accurately measuring the effectiveness of anything in business comes down to choosing the right metrics.
Most metrics are valuable in some way, but they are only ever useful if they are used in the right context.
For example, there is no use analyzing metrics such as sentiment when the end goal was to get users to click through to your site.
In this way, you need to choose the metric which fits in with the goals and aims of your campaign.
So, if your aim is to use social media posts to drive traffic to your website, the most important metric will be click-through rate; if you are looking to get social media users to buy your products, the most important metric will be the conversion rate.
Having access to a vast volume of data is great, but it’s only helpful if it reflects the information you need to know.
In terms of the best tool to use, there are few more helpful social media tools available than Hootsuite, especially if you manage multiple accounts for multiple companies.
This helpful tool has a range of benefits, allowing you to schedule, monitor and promote your social media posts.
Importantly, it also gives you access to a wide range of analytics tools, including the more basic metrics such as likes and number of followers, as well as the ability to monitor mentions, conversations, and how long your team takes to respond to and resolve.
In addition, it monitors mentions, comments, and replies to your posts.
This allows you to easily consider a range of important factors across all of your social media posts.
You can even use the tool to create customized reports on your social media performance which you can then export to clients or supervisors with ease.”
Contributor: Steve Pritchard – Digital Marketing Consultant, Healing Holidays
“What works best for me is using Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of our social media efforts.
That’s because with the usage of UTM links (links to the posts at the end of your URLs) you can track exactly how many people visited a specific directory from your posts and how many of them converted.
All the other metrics that standard social media platforms give you are a pity when it comes to standard social media posts.
That’s because engagement, the number of likes, and similar are not important if they don’t help you get customers.”
Jakub Kliszczak, Marketing Specialist, CrazyCall, https://www.crazycall.com,
How to Measure Social Media Effectiveness
“Google Analytics:
The most important metric for us happens to be the number of social shares of the content which in turn is the cumulative metric for multiple other metrics like popularity, engagement, and relevance of the content.
We leverage Google Analytics to capture data for greater visibility and understanding where our customers are coming from, what content they are interacting with, the design they are engaging with, and which kind of social ad campaigns are leading to greater conversion rates.
We look at what the consumers are engaging with and for how long and give insightful data about their journey to us.
Such data can be efficiently studied to make decisions regarding planning and strategizing about key social marketing initiatives and moving customers in the sales funnel from awareness to consideration to the final purchase, and after-sales services.
We primarily use our social media channels for branding and Google Analytics helps us gauge how much website traffic is driven by social media posts.”
Contributor: Shakun Bansal, Head of Marketing Mercer | Mett
How to Measure Social Media Effectiveness
“We use Facebook as our main social channel for promotion and marketing because of the superior level of audience insights and analytics it offers compared to competing portals.
However, because social media marketing is better for building brand awareness than selling directly and social media users don’t respond to a hard sell approach, it can be hard to correlate our social spending to its ultimate long-term ROI.
We tend to measure engagement specifically and try to correlate this with sales and increased page or site visits.
We also track and try to boost engagement and shares of our content and offers by means of dedicating time to actually interacting with people on our pages and other channels to start a conversation and generate interest.
Taking a more person-centric approach rather than marketing “at” social media prospects is more effective long term, but the flipside of this is that as mentioned, it is harder to measure the full effectiveness of our efforts.”
Polly Kay, Senior Marketing Manager at English Blinds, https://www.englishblinds.co.uk
How to Measure Social Media Effectiveness
“As giving real examples works best when sharing how to do a specific thing, I would talk from personal experience.
The metrics which our company follows in order to understand the audience’s engagement, include sharing, commenting, and liking on a post.
It is pretty simple to see whether you have been effective on social media or not.
My best and very simple advice to you would be to focus on the optimization of a profile that you would want to see results for. The most important thing is being consistent and carefully considering your content, not posting simply because someone thought you should have a social media profile.
It is very well said – ‘Use it or lose it.’
For instance, this year we optimized our Pinterest profile – the name of boards, images, descriptions, links, and added some new content.
Unexpectedly, we obtained incredibly high results in just 3 months, going from 500 monthly viewers of our content to 27.4 k viewers per month.”
Contributor: My name is Nikola Baldikov and I`m a Digital Marketing Manager at Brosix, a secure instant messaging software for business communication. Besides my passion for digital marketing, I am an avid fan of football and I love to dance.
Website: https://www.brosix.com
“We are always on the lookout to see how we can get the most out of our social media channels and ROI is a huge area of interest for us.
One thing I think is important and doesn’t come up often is that before you even begin to start tracking metrics and following results, you need to understand exactly what it is you want from your social media efforts.
Are you looking for Engagement? Sales? List Signups?
Things like this can’t easily be defined from clicks alone and you need to make sure you’re looking at the correct things to see their effectiveness.
An article that has been shared multiple times doesn’t necessarily always lead to a large amount of sales conversions, for example, and that is something that could indicate a problem with your sales page rather than your social media campaign.
This is the advice I would give to anyone looking at measuring their social media success.”
Contributor: Mark Webster is Co-founder of Authority Hacker, an industry-leading online marketing education company. Through their video training courses, blog, and weekly podcast, they educate the beginner and expert marketers alike. Many of their 6,000+ students have taken their existing businesses to the forefront of their industries or had multi-million dollar exits.
Site URL: https://www.authorityhacker.com/
How to Measure Social Media Effectiveness
“Social media has many different benefits for companies. In order to measure its effectiveness, you have to first set goals for your social presence.
The most common goals are to create a brand identity, reach current and new customers, and increase revenue.
The associated metrics to measure the effectiveness and ROI of these goals are engagement, followers, and sales, respectively.
Most of the social media platforms today have built-in analytics and reporting tools that can help to track social media effectiveness and RIO.
However, I prefer to use the Hootsuite analytics tool and Google Analytics.
With Hootsuite, you can compare all your social media accounts in one report.
It shows common metrics making it easy to compare how your Twitter strategy is working against your Instagram strategy.
Google Analytics makes it easy to track which social channel brought a customer to your website, if the customer made a purchase, and how much that purchase was for.
You can aggregate these over any time period and track your revenue credited to social media. I have attached some screenshots to show what these reports look like.
Hootsuite engagement allows you to compare two time periods of posts. It shows how many of your followers are interacting with your brand and which individual posts resonated with your audience the most. Another great way to track the effectiveness of your brand is to monitor your inbound messages.
With Hootsuite, you can track the intention of the messages, either positive, negative, or neutral.
Hootsuite helps you track your number of followers over a given time period across all your social platforms. This helps you see how many new customers you are reaching with your content.
Google Analytics has a few views that are useful to report social media effectiveness and ROI. I prefer to use the Social Overview under the Acquisitions tab. This overview shows you how much revenue came from social platforms as well as some other helpful metrics like conversion rate.”
Name: Devon McCrossinTitle: Marketing DirectorWebsite Name: Boomtown Internet Group Website: boomtownig.com
Social Media Effectiveness
“Our policy at Exposure Ninja is to go back to basics when analyzing social media performance.
While tools and software can be helpful for firms with a huge social team working on an account, individuals can use inbuilt social software such as Facebook Insights to gain a lot of useful information about the effectiveness of their strategy.
We recently wrote an article about this on SEMRush which guides those who are losing followers through a simple process to determine why this is happening.
An even simpler way to track your social presence is by listening out for word-of-mouth comments.
We took note of some positive comments we received during a trade show about our campaign leading up to the show which has given us some insight into the type of content that is likely to engage our audience. We never could have gained this type of feedback from any technical tool.”
Contributor: Bethany Spence, Content Marketing Specialist, Exposure Ninja Website: https://exposureninja.com/
Bio Page: https://exposureninja.com/blog/author/bethany-spence/
Social Media Effectiveness – Response from Agency Founder
“We work with various brands across multiple industries to build integrated digital marketing programs that span social media, advertising, content, and influencer components.
The foundation of all our programs is data analysis. We pair metrics with creativity to drive business results.
When we’re measuring the effectiveness of our social media programs, we take a multi-step approach:
- What are the goals? We first determine our client’s goals as they vary across industry and brand. For example, one client’s business is centered around content consumption and, as a result, they place heavy emphasis on video views and URL clicks. Another client reports against engagement. Ensuring that we’re not only building a healthy social media presence but meeting our client’s goals is paramount and informs all future program decisions.
- Multiple Metrics – One metric alone is not indicative of social media health. While a client’s goal may be video views, we do not ignore all other aspects of channel growth such as followers, engagement, etc. With new clients, we monitor and report on their channels for several months in order to build a trendline, internal KPIs (key performance indicators), and benchmarks. Those internal KPIs are then paired with industry benchmarks to give a roadmap of how the channels should grow and perform month over month.
Consistently we look at
Engagements – We calculate our own engagement number to focus on the action engagements and show true follower interest. For example – Twitter reports on image clicks but that is not weighted as heavily as URL clicks.
Follower Growth
Reach
URL Clicks – These are rolled up into engagements as well as separately reported upon. At any given time we want to see what percentage of engagements is made up of clicks. This enables to understand the extent to which followers are consuming content.
Conversions & Website Traffic from Social Referrals
Tracking Tools – Channel specific metrics are pulled into a social media management tool on monthly, quarterly, half-year, and yearly cadences.
The tool often depends upon the client’s internal systems, but there are many out there that will work such as Sprinklr or Later.com.
In a pinch, one can pull individual channel metrics natively from the platforms and aggregate them.
While we look at each channel separately; it’s critical to see the overall, big-picture view of the program. So however you need to get all metrics together and aggregated, do it.
Custom UTM Tracking – Custom UTM tracking is critical in accurately understanding how social media impacts business goals.
We build automated link generators for our clients that append custom tracking to every single brand link that is published on social channels.
This allows us to separate owned social media referral traffic from earned and tells us how effective brand channels are.
Custom Channel Groupings in Google Analytics – In addition to custom UTM tracking we develop custom channel groupings in Google Analytics to automatically separate social referral traffic into earned, owned, and paid. This tells us at a glance which elements of the program are performing well and which need to be optimized.
Ask the Triple Why – We always ask the triple why to drill down into the cause of a success or learning experience. This enables us to better understand the psychology behind content and replicate it.
Say that one particular post did extremely well, we would ask:
Why did this post perform well? Answer: It contained a video.
Why did that video do well in comparison to other videos: Answer: It was a live video feed from an event.
Why did a live video capture attention? Answer: The brand’s followers want real-time updates and experiential moments that they cannot get elsewhere.
These methods and others have enabled us to significantly grow client channels and impact their goals. Attached are screenshots that showcase year-over-year program growth as well as custom channel groupings for one of our clients.”
Emily Lyman
I’m the Founder & President of the digital marketing agency Branch & Bramble.
Google Campaign Builder and Analytics – Recommended Social Media Measurement Effectiveness
What tools or methods do you use to track your social media ROI?
“Adespresso and Facebook Attribution modeling all the way for paid social media campaigns. And a combination of Google Analytics and Google Campaign Builder for organic.”
Why do you prefer these tools or methods?
“By using Google Campaign Builder you can assign campaign tag identifiers to every social post you publish. You can then use Google Analytics to track time on page, bounce rate and conversions to measure the effectiveness of each post.
In addition, you can then create custom audiences based on individual page visitors and set up Facebook and Instagram reach type advanced sequential retargeting campaigns to help increase conversion rates.”
Here’s a screenshot from one of these campaigns we run for a fashion ecommerce client.”
Contributor = Alistair Dodds
Position = Marketing Director and Co-Founder
Company Name = Ever Increasing Circles
Website = www.everincreasingcircles.com
Google Search Console, Bit.ly, and Ahrefs will help owners understand their social traffic much better.
“For search traffic and where it’s coming from, Google Search Console gives you everything you need. You’ll know exactly how much of your traffic is coming from Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms.
However, if you want to track clicks through to a specific URL, use Bit.ly. Many influencers and businesses will use a different bit.ly link in their Instagram bio and Twitter bio to see clicks directly from those platforms.
Setting up a Link Tree landing page is also another great way to see how many people are clicking through to specific pages of your website.
Finally, I would also highly recommend signing up for Ahrefs. Within its many website ranking tools, it gives you clear insight into where backlinks and traffic is coming from via specific URLs, to any page on your website.
Outside of tracking tools, measuring ROI is more complicated. You have to use your social platforms as one part of your larger marketing funnel, and understand that getting traffic to your website is just the beginning.
You may get a high percentage of traffic from Facebook, but if, say, your landing page is poorly optimized, that traffic isn’t going to convert. That’s not a Facebook traffic issue; it’s a conversion issue.”
Dale Johnson | Co-founder, Nomad Paradise | www.nomadparadise.com | Since 2016 I’ve been working remotely as a content marketer and publicist, have been featured in the likes of Forbes, Washington Post, and WSJ, and have traveled to, or lived in, 29 countries and counting.
“I do nothing fancy AT ALL when it comes to tracking social media performance.
For me, it’s all about actual clicks through to my blogs. There are so many vanity metrics in social media, but really it doesn’t matter how many people pin things and like things if they don’t actually visit and engage.
As such, all I look at is how many people are arriving from each social media site, and how much they engage once they arrive – in terms of time on page and bounce rate. Google Analytics is more than adequate for this.”
ABOUT ME: I’m Ben Taylor, a serial solopreneur since 2004 and founder of www.homeworkingclub.com, an advice portal for aspiring freelancers.
Measure social media ROI – effectiveness of retargeting campaigns
“We do a lot of organic social media marketing, but we know that this will be more effective for awareness rather than driving conversions, so when measuring the impact of our organic social media activities, we focus more on the ROI of our retargeting campaigns through social media.
If our retargeting campaigns are performing well, this is a good indicator to us that our initial organic social media activity was also positive.
We’ll play close attention to the stats we’re seeing in each of the dashboards for the social media platforms we’re running retargeting ads on.”
Sam Williamson, Streaming Movies Right, https://streamingmoviesright.com
What tools or methods do you use to track your social media ROI?
“Social media ROI depends on your reasons for using social media.
For example, are you using social media to make sales, garner attention to your website, generate media interest in your web series?
These questions determine what ROI looks like for you.
Even those who use social media for fun are utilizing ROI to a certain extent.
For example, if you are selling products on Instagram, you can measure how many times people go to your site, how many views you are receiving, and ultimately how many sales you have.
From my perspective as a human capital consultant and academic researcher, I tend to use engagement with materials that I share whether its blog posts, YouTube videos etc.
As an academic researcher, I looked at the number of reads for my publications. On social media such as Twitter, I look at engagement with a particular tweet, or how many views I have on a particular blog post.
Tweetdeck is a common tool used to measure effectiveness on Twitter but Facebook and LinkedIn provide similar metrics.
If you use Buffer or Hootsuite, they’ll also provide you with similar metrics. But despite the metrics, the ROI is determined by your goals on social media.
In many cases, I calculate my own engagement scores or review qualitative feedback on posts to determine quality. “
Contributor: Dr. Sy Islam, www.talentmetrics.io
I’m an Associate Professor at Farmingdale State College and the Vice President of Consulting for Talent Metrics specializing in selection, compensation, training, and organizational development and market research. One of my areas of academic research and applied practice is social media effectiveness and use in selection.
“We think engagement is more important than total views or impressions. That’s how we measure the success of our social media campaigns.
We want to see that our audience is connecting with our videos and posts instead of just quickly watching the first three seconds and then skipping by them.
As such, we pay special attention to metrics like comment-to -mpression ratio and like-to-impression ratio.
These metrics give us an idea of what percentage of people we reach are actually engaged with our content.
At the end of the day, we can’t monetize viewers who are not interested or engaged with the videos and posts we publish. We’re just wasting money and resources at that point.”
Contributor: My name is Matthew Ross. I am the co-owner and COO of RIZKNOWS and The Slumber Yard which operate consumer product review websites. We also operate two YouTube channels that have over 550K subscribers combined.
How to Measure Social Media Effectiveness
“We use the native in the platforms to monitor our engagement as well as Buffer and Tailwind.
We also use MonsterInsights/Google Analytics to track the effectiveness of our social media efforts through traffic.
With Tailwind, it provides the ability to manipulate our data on both Instagram and Pinterest more than within the social channels themselves.
It allows us to see the big picture of our efforts and campaigns. Plus, we can reschedule posts to optimize our content.
Buffer allows us the ability to see our most popular likes, retweets, replies and the ability to reschedule them as well all in one place.
Native data allows us for a quick glance to check on performance where schedulers like Buffer, Tailwind, and others allow us to plan out our editorial calendar on social media and the ability to see the big picture of the efforts you’re making by manipulating the data provided.”
Screenshot Courtesy of Tailwind
Farasat Khan, https://www.isitwp.com/
“One tool we use here at ZooWho to track the effectiveness of our social media efforts is Google Analytics.
If you are sharing links to your website through social media, you can see how much traffic your website gained from each social media source under the “Referral” reports.
If you set up conversion tracking on your website you can track how many sales (or other measures of success) came directly from a social media platform.”
Claire, Zoowho.com http://www.zoowho.com/
How to Measure Social Media Success: FAQ
Monitor your audience’s behavior. Use tools to see if engagement is growing.
Many free and paid tools were mentioned here. However, the most common answers were Google Analytics and Hootsuite.
You need to use tools to track your analytics. I use Google Analytics and Buffer. Many of the experts interviewed here use Google Analytics as well.
Wrapping Up: How to Measure Social Media Effectiveness
In this expert roundup, the respondents offered data that proves the power of these tools.
Use that data to guide your social media promotion planning.
Takeaways
As you read, did you notice a pattern among the respondents?
I did.
Common Responses
The experts repeatedly recommended Google Analytics.
Disagreements
However, there seemed to be a point of disagreement between several of the respondents.
First, the contributors disagreed about whether you could actually determine what was bringing you the greatest return on your time using social media tools.
For example, respondent Polly Kaye disagreed with others about the ease of measuring social media success.
She wrote, “Because social media marketing is better for building brand awareness than selling directly and social media users don’t respond to a hard sell approach, it can be hard to correlate our social spending to its ultimate long-term ROI.”
Dale Johnson agreed. He explained, “Measuring ROI is more complicated.”
On the other hand, Nikola Baldikov reported, “It is pretty simple to see whether you have been effective on social media or not.”
Bethany Spence felt you can measure ROI but not by using a tool. She shared, “An even simpler way to track your social presence is by listening out for word-of-mouth comments. We never could have gained this type of feedback from any technical tool.”
Next, the respondents disagreed over the value of Pinterest.
Nikola Baldikov enthused, “We obtained incredibly high results in just 3 months, going from 500 monthly viewers of our content to 27.4 k viewers per month.”
Ben Taylor wrote, “It doesn’t matter how many people pin things and like things if they don’t actually visit and engage.”
Readers, please share so others discover how to measure social media effectiveness using these tools and methods.
I look forward to your views in the comment section. Which tools do you use? Can you suggest any new tools so people learn how to measure social media effectiveness?
Janice Wald is the founder of MostlyBlogging.com and co-founder of the Mostly Blogging Academy. She is an ebook author, blogger, blogging coach, blogging judge, freelance writer, and speaker. She won the Best Internet Marketer Award and the Best Blogger Award at the 2021 Infinity Blog Awards. Wald was also nominated as 2019 Best Internet Marketer by the Infinity Blog Awards and in 2017 as the Most Informative Blogger by the London Bloggers Bash. She’s been featured on Small Business Trends, the Huffington Post, and Lifehack.
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