How Do You Know If Your Social Media Strategy Is Working?

If social media is part of your marketing strategy (and it should be), how can you be sure your social media strategy is working?  Most people think that it is about how many followers you have. In truth, while followers is one indicator of growth and visibility, the true measurement of a working strategy is engagement.

What is engagement?

It’s any type of interaction from your customers and visitors that goes beyond a passive reaction, or response to your postings and content. Engagement can be a like, a comment, a share, or even a mention.

Here’s how can you easily and effectively track your level of engagement on social media.

Audience Rate of Growth 

Audience Growth Rate measures the speed at which your brand’s following increases on social media. It’s how quickly you gain followers. When tracking your audience rate of growth, the question to ask yourself becomes: “How fast did we gain last month’s net new followers, and was it faster than our competition?”

How to track it:

  1. Measure your net new followers (on each platform) over a specified reporting period.
  2. Divide your net new followers by your total audience (on each platform) and multiply by 100 to get your audience growth rate percentage. You can also track your competitors’ progress the same way.

Discover How Many People Have Viewed Your Post Since It Went Live. 

How to track it:

Divide the number of reactions by your total number of followers, and then multiply by 100 to get your post reach percentage.

It’s worth noting that if you or your business has a fan page on Facebook, the “When Your Fans Are Online” feature will tell you the optimal time to post. Use this data to increase your reach. 

Applause Rate 

This is the number of approval actions (e.g., likes, favorites) your post receives relative to your total number of followers.

How to track it:

  1. Add up the total approval actions your post receives over the course of a specific reporting period.
  2. Divide that number by your total followers, and then multiply by 100 to get your applause rate percentage.

Average Rate of Engagement

Your average rate of engagement is the number of actions (e.g., likes, shares, comments) your post receives, relative to your total number of followers.

How to track it:

  1. Add up your post’s total likes, comments, and shares.
  2. Divide this number by your total number of followers, and multiply it by 100 to get your average engagement rate percentage.

Conversion Rate

Your rate of conversion is the number of visitors who, after clicking on a link in your post, take action on a page (e.g., subscribe to your newsletter; download an offer, register for a webinar etc.) against that page’s total visitors.

A high conversion rate means your content is valuable and compelling to the target audience. From a social media standpoint, it’s a sign that your post was relevant to the offer. In other words, your post accomplished what it was supposed to.

How to track it:

  1. Create a post with a call-to-action link. Use a URL to make it trackable.
  2. Place a “cookie” on the user’s machine. Doing so attaches the lead to a campaign.
  3. Use the campaign reporting to track the total number of clicks and conversions generated by the post.
  4. Divide conversions by total clicks and multiply by 100 to get your conversion rate percentage.

Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate is the percentage of page visitors who click on a link in your post, but quickly leave the page they land on without taking any kind of positive action.

A bounce rate lets you measure your social media traffic—and, in turn, ROI—against other sources of traffic, like for instance, traffic from a Facebook post vs. traffic from an organic Google search.

How to track it:

  1. If you haven’t already done so, set up a Free Google Analytics account.
  2. Open the “acquisition” tab, and look under “all traffic” for the “channels” segment.
  3. Click on the “bounce rate” button, which will rank all of the channels you post on from your lowest bounce rate to the highest.

Follow these simple steps and in no time at all, you’ll be tracking the engagement on all of your social media platforms, accurately and with precision.