Advertising is an ever-changing endeavor, and social media ads have opened up a universe of marketing that was previously unavailable to B2B businesses. In addition to reaching out to contacts using trade outlets in a given industry or laser-targeting potential buyers with sales prospecting tools and cold calls or emails, social media marketing offers the chance to target a wide swath of prospects based on location, interests, and carefully-selected demographic factors.
Whether you’re working a campaign on Facebook or leveraging Instagram to catch the interest of new clients, it’s essential to know whether a campaign is effective. Here are the metrics that will help you measure the results of your social media marketing efforts.
4 Things to Measure When Evaluating Your Social Media Marketing Performance
1. Audience Reach
Monitoring audience reach helps you understand just how many people were exposed to any given social media campaign. While each social media platform has a slightly different definition of reach, it will show you how many users viewed your content in their feeds. This will give you an idea of the degree to which specific campaigns are working to spread brand awareness. Noticeable valleys in reach are an indication that future campaigns may require tweaking to ensure the maximum number of views of your content.
As you look at audience numbers, make sure you’re reaching out on platforms that will attract your target demographic. Don’t count out newer platforms like TikTok; many B2B companies are embracing this as a fresh social media strategy. Just like other platforms, make sure you’re keeping track of your TikTok metrics and audience reach.
2. Follower Growth
Once you’ve optimized your social media marketing to reach the maximum audience, the next statistic to monitor is the growth of your followers. While the number of new followers doesn’t necessarily indicate the success of a campaign (some social media marketing experts even categorize number of followers as a “vanity stat,” it is an indicator that you’re reaching an audience that’s actively engaging with your social media accounts rather than simply viewing your content and scrolling on past.
If you note a sudden spike in followers, consider factors that may have resulted in the bump. Did you experiment with a different tone in campaign or content? Did someone influential mention your company, showcasing your product or services? Connecting increases in followers is helpful for determining future social media strategy.
3. Engagement Rate
While number of followers is a key metric to evaluate, engagement rate is even more important. From seeing your posts and following you on social media, engaging with your posts by liking, commenting on, and sharing them, this takes your prospects to the next step on the journey of becoming conversions… and then clients.
How do you boil down the various kinds of engagement into a metric that’s measurable? Simply take a post’s number of comments, likes, and shares and divide it by your total number of followers. Then, divide that number by 100. This average engagement rate percentage will give you the ability to measure one campaign against another to determine what kind of content boosts engagement and what falls flat.
4. Conversions
While brand awareness is excellent, it’s not meaningful unless it’s generating conversions. Followers, likes, comments, and shares are good, but the entire goal of social media marketing is, of course, to boost sales.
Measuring assisted social conversions digs deep into your social media marketing metrics, helping you determine what conversions a social media post guided. These conversions are prospects who have visited your site in the past due to a social media post but left before taking action. Perhaps they clicked on a social media ad, landed on your site, and got distracted by something else before following through. The same client may remember your company and return directly to your site a few days later. Keeping track of assisted social conversions helps you determine when a social media campaign boosted these types of visits – even if they didn’t happen right away.
Mastering B2B social media marketing is about being willing to evolve and pivot according to data. By keeping track of key metrics and understanding what types of posts and brand behavior drives up followers, engagement, and — most importantly — conversions, you’ll be able to craft meaningful campaigns and content to entertain, educate, and boost sales.
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