When planning and executing a social media strategy for your brand, it’s important to keep in mind the various ways of measuring success.
With both organic and paid social content, there are many ways to determine whether or not your social media presence is helping you achieve your company’s strategic goals. Some of these measures will be in the form of tangible data and metrics, while others will be less formal and anecdotal.
In this blog, we’ll look at a few of the key ways to measure success of organic social media content, which include tracking engagement metrics, analyzing sentiment, and feeling proud of your content.
3 Success Metrics for Organic Social Media
1. Engagement Metrics
One of the best ways to show success on social media is through engagement metrics. Nearly all of the major social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin – provide this type of data for their users.
Engagement can be measured in various ways, including the core combination of likes, comments, and shares. Did your content get someone to stop scrolling long enough to engage with your brand? If so, that’s a huge win.
In a world of never-ending social content and online conversations, content that breaks through to grab your audience’s attention – if even for a moment – can make all the difference. When your online audience engages with your posts, they’re engaging with your whole brand. When they share your post, they’re also sharing your name and logo. When they comment, they’re talking directly to your company.
This is why consistent, engaging content is so critical to success. You want social media users to choose you for a moment, to stop scrolling and focus their attention on your brand, your content. If you consistently put out attention-grabbing, engaging content, you will quickly build a reputation for this, and users will condition themselves to check out almost everything you post.
It’s also important to remember that social media is a uniquely human platform, so the content that is most relatable will often have the strongest engagement. This is why throwback posts, authentic visuals, and engaging questions are so successful on social media.
While this type of content may not feel like “marketing” in the way you usually think about it, it’s crucial that your social media voice be as human as possible so it doesn’t stand out as too stuffy or sales-y. The more relatable your content is, the more likely your metrics will show consistent engagement and audience growth.
2. Sentiment
When your audience does engage with your social media content, what’s the mood of that engagement? Are the comments positive? Are people writing positive remarks when they share your posts?
While there are tools to measure sentiment scores, a key component of this is the natural human ability to feel how things are going. When your social content is going well, you can sense it. Not only can you read the positive comments and see the metrics, you can also feel the energy around it.
Think about networking events you’ve attended. You engage in several conversations with many different groups of people. You exchange business cards and cell numbers. You follow each other on Linkedin.
Are there any metrics you can pull up that can show your return on the investment of time, money, and energy to attend this event? No. But at the end of the day, you know if it went well. You know if you made honest connections that will last over time.
Social media is really just one giant networking opportunity. Are you making key connections with your audience?
3. Pride
To stay on the networking event example, think about those moments right before you attend the event. You make sure to wear the appropriate clothing, you fix your hair, you think about how you’ll present yourself to others. You walk in the room with confidence and poise. No matter how the event goes or how many people you meet, you know you feel good about what you’re putting out in the world.
That same pride and confidence is essential on social media.
Because not every user of social media directly engages with the content they see; you won’t always know if someone read your post or laughed at your videos or told a friend about your images. Again, much like when you attend a networking event, you may not always know who noticed you from across the room or who learned about you through the proverbial grapevine.
A great example of this are Super Bowl commercials. Brands spend a ton of time and money putting together commercials that are typically trying to make you laugh, feel nostalgic, or maybe even cry. But can they track every person who laughs or cries? Of course not. Can they know that you laughed at the commercial when you saw it, then laughed again the next morning when you’re telling your colleagues about it? No.
So at the end of the day, these companies just have to feel confident that they produced quality content that is both on brand and relatable on a genuine human level.
If you are proud of your content, proud of how you’ve presented yourself to the public, you can feel assured that you’re making the right moves on social media.
