How to Determine if a Social Media Campaign is Successful

You spent days strategizing, and you finally ran your campaign across all of your social channels, but how do you know if it worked? Keep reading to learn how to determine if your social media campaign was successful.

You Fulfilled Your SMART Goals

To determine the success of your content, you need to have an established set of goals to figure out what success means to you in the first place. Whether you want to increase brand awareness, website traffic, engagement rates, or conversions, you need to have these objectives clearly defined.

One way to set clear objectives is by making them SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Knowing how to write SMART goals will help you set a clear direction for your social marketing campaign and allow you to measure the performance of your social media marketing efforts appropriately. Once you have defined your goals, you can track your key performance indicators (KPIs) and other important metrics more accurately. After running your campaign, go back to the SMART goals you created to see if you met them.

Review historical data and industry standards if you’re unsure what benchmarks you should strive to meet when forming goals. Look at past campaigns to benchmark the performance of your current ones and set growth objectives. You can also look at industry standards and competitor performance if you don’t have your own data. These processes will not only help you create goals for your current campaigns, but they can also help you determine what social media content mistakes you should avoid in future campaigns.

You Tracked The Right Metrics

Metrics are key in helping you make sense of your social media marketing effectiveness because they provide quantitative evidence of your success or failure. Social media analytics tools like Hootsuite, Google Analytics, and Twitter Analytics provide insight into a number of social media metrics. Still, to properly compare active campaign performance to set goals, you must focus on the right ones.

This means that you need to give less weight to vanity metrics, metrics that may make you seem successful but aren’t relevant to your campaign. You can decide which metrics are vanity metrics by assessing your campaign objectives. Once you identify which metrics to track, you can measure the performance of your campaign and compare data to your metric-oriented SMART goals and benchmarks.

You Learned A Lesson

Even if your campaign didn’t meet the marks you initially wanted, it still has value. A social media campaign isn’t truly successful unless you learn something about your social media performance. Whether you realize that you need to better adapt each piece of content for each unique social media platform, that you need to create more engaging social media posts to reach a larger number of people, or that you need to work on goal setting and measurement, every campaign brings a learning opportunity. Each new campaign you carry out gives you more historical data and can be a reference for what to do or not to do in the future.

Whatever your business goals, Front Porch Solutions can help you form effective campaigns that reach your target audience and achieve social media success. Contact one of our digital marketing experts today for help with all of your social media management needs!