Question 10 of 10 Essential Questions for Your Social Media Marketing Campaign is “How do I evaluate the results?”
If you planned properly this is an easy question. At the outset you should have set a measurable goal and set a time period. So now all you have to do is, when you hit the milestone set, look to see if you reached your goal.
In our first question we talked about setting goals and what those goals might look like. The funny thing about goals though is they often change. And that’s ok. The important thing is to continually set, measure and reset your goals. If you had said you wanted to get 200 new subscribers to your newsletter over a two month period and you hit 250 after one month, it would be a good idea to evaluate after one month and change the goal to, for example, 700.
If you only had 20 new subscribers after a month but three of them converted to customers, you might reset the goal to 50 and add a new goal of converting 10 of them to customers. But if you haven’t set a goal, how do you know if you reached it or not?
Other things you can measure as a part of your evaluation of a social media campaign include:
- Number of Facebook fans
- Number of re-tweets onTwitter
- Number of profile views on LinkedIn
- Number of views on YouTube
- Number of click throughs from any social site to your actual web site
- Number of new newsletter subscribers
- Number of new customers
Note that new customers is only one measurement. And it is probably not the most important at first. Of more importance is how you engage and interact with the “friends”, “followers”, “connections” or other social media friends in order to build your network over the long term.