Evaluate the effectiveness of your social media marketing

‘Evaluation’ is the third part of the cycle of best practice in your social media strategy – the other two being to plan your strategy and then to implement it.  

After implementation (for a pre-determined period) it is vital to ‘evaluate’ it, so that you know what you are doing right or wrong, where you are succeeding or failing, what works and what doesn’t. The evaluation phase checks that you are doing everything correctly to get the best out of your social media campaign. 

Follow the stats – not your subjective opinion

For the evaluation phase to be successful, it is important that you are objective, following the stats and making tough decisions which may go against your own subjective and personal instincts. Take a step back to look at the bigger picture.  

You can start off small by improving upon one aspect; in the end, it’s all about incremental adjustments to make your social media the best it can be. Rome wasn’t built in a day… your social presence won’t be either. 

How to measure and monitor

The most important rule is to focus. There are a huge range of stats available, from many different sources and all presented differently. If you’re not careful you’ll end up being overwhelmed with irrelevance, so just choose what’s right for you: engagement rate, impressions, reach, messages, replies etc. 

You’ll find each channel has its own native analytics, or you can make your own tools using Excel or equivalent. Manual monitoring saves money whilst automated monitoring saves time, so decide what works best for you.  

Why not make use of social media measuring tools? Sprout Social, Hootsuite Analytics, Google Analytics, etc. Using custom live social analytics dashboards will do the crunching for you and update automatically – and they’re very simple to use. 

How to process your data

This requires considerable thought, because it’s too easy to rush into it, become disillusioned and never do it again. So make sure you only have the data you need, presented using charts and infographics that clarify, not confuse. KISS – ‘keep it simple, stupid’! 

Be objective about it, share it with stakeholders and discuss what they mean – there’s always something new to discover! 

‘Engagement’ – the most important measure!

Engagement is hard won but is what social media is all about. 

It’s easy to gain more followers – just post something that you know will catch their attention. But are they actually reading it? Are they the right people – the people you want? You’ll only find out and really achieve anything useful if you have some form of ‘engagement’ with them.  

Social media engagement is more than just the accumulation of followers across social platforms. It’s also a measurement of how many people are paying attention to and interacting with your brand on a daily basis. 

Engagement is also an important step on the road of converting followers to customers. 

There are many ‘engagement’ formulas – you have to work out which is best for your purposes –here are some examples of the most common: 

Engagement rate = Total engagement / Total followers x 100

by post = Total engagements on a post / Total followers x 100

by post = Total engagements on a post / Total followers x 100

Analysis – reviewing your performance and drawing conclusions

Now we come to the important bit: what do the figures tell you? What are you learning and drawing from them? 

Align your data findings with KPIs to see if your performance is measuring up. 

Feedback is important: there is no such thing as ‘failure’ – only feedback. Two pairs of eyes are better than one, so call on a colleague from another department if you don’t have another in your own. Staying objective and confirming your interpretation is important!  

Acknowledge your achievements as well as your failures – make hard decisions, or you’ll end up drifting aimlessly along, and begin to set new targets: ask the tough questions, such as: are you achieving your targets? If not, why not? If yes, are they too low? 

Your response and future planning

So what has been the point of all this? 

Here’s what: you have to consider how to adapt your plan. Here are our top tips: 

1. Keep doing the good things well,
   But remember there is always room for improvement. 
2. What isn’t working?
   Don’t be afraid to do things differently. Test and test and test again! 
3. How will your targets change or not?
   Align this to new campaigns objectives. 
4. Does your content need to change?
   Are your content types working hard enough? EG articles, videos, photos, infographics etc. 
5. How will your messages change?
   Do you need to be saying things differently?  
6. What do you now understand about your strategy?
   Have your activities met your objectives, does your strategy now need to develop? 

Now that you have completed this third phase of your strategic use of social media, it’s time to reconsider and adapt or amend your plan, before implementing it, then going through this phase of evaluation again and repeating the process. 

It’s a never-ending cycle of continuous improvement which will bring you all the many benefits social media can bring you. 

Do let me know if we can help you with yours!

I hope you’ve found this helpful. If you want to discuss any of this info, or your own social media implementation, do please contact me on mark@mar-com.net, or on 07860 799426. 

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