How to Measure Your Social Media Success

Social media has become one of the most powerful tools a business can use for connecting with audiences, building brands, and achieving marketing goals. But how do you know if your B2B social media strategy is actually working? How do you measure social media success? As a specialist B2B social media agency, we’ve compiled our wisdom to help you measure and boost your performance.

Define Your Goals

Before diving into numbers, identify your social media goals. Are you aiming to boost brand awareness, drive website traffic, or generate leads? Different goals require different metrics, which also impact which channels you should invest more time in. If you’re looking for lead gen, then you need to analyse where your target customer is browsing the most and hit them with a paid targeted campaign to complement your organic social media.

Start by setting monthly or quarterly KPIs to help keep you motivated, and run a competitor analysis to learn which platforms are popular and for what purpose.

Key Metrics to Track

Marketing can be segmented into lots of areas, but everything can be categorised as either brand awareness or lead generation. What tends to happen with social media is that although the focus is on the brand and community, by growing these two entities, the ideal scenario is that more exposure will naturally lead to more sales.

Now, let’s explore some key metrics to track:

Reach & Impressions

Understand how many people saw your content (reach) and how many times it was displayed (impressions).

Engagement

This is where things get interesting. Track likes, comments, shares, and saves to see how your audience interacts with your content. Engagement rate (total engagements divided by reach) reveals how compelling your posts are.

Website Traffic & Leads

Monitor the number of people who click through your social media posts on your website. You can use UTM parameters to track which social platforms drive the most traffic. Analyse the number of website visitors who convert into leads, providing valuable insights into your sales funnel.

Brand Mentions & Sentiment Analysis

Track how often your brand is mentioned online and the sentiment behind those mentions. This helps you understand brand perception and identify areas for improvement.

Follower Growth

While a large following is tempting, quality over quantity reigns supreme. Analyse your follower growth rate and demographics to understand who you’re reaching.

Keep an eye on your competitors’ social media presence. See what content resonates with their audience and use that to inform your own strategy.

Tools For The Trade

Most social media platforms offer built-in analytics dashboards. But for a deeper dive, consider social media management tools like Metricool, Hootsuite or Sprout Social. These tools provide comprehensive reports and make it easier to track metrics across different platforms.

Measuring social media success is an ongoing process. Experiment with different content formats, track your results and adjust your strategy accordingly. By focusing on the right metrics and using the right tools, you can unlock the true potential of your social media presence.

You’re not going to figure it all out overnight. Finding social media success will involve making bold decisions and probably making a few mistakes. But that shouldn’t scare you. Mistakes are just another opportunity to learn. The important thing is to keep an eye on your analytics and utilise reporting to track results and continue to refine the content you produce.

Making Data-Driven Decisions

Analysing the data is one thing, but it’s time to put the numbers to work and make some tough decisions. You may have to accept that social media isn’t going to be right for your business, or at least it’s not working in the way you have been using it. It’s time to adapt or die.

B2B businesses often want to focus on LinkedIn marketing because a lot of their customers use the platform. But it’s not just about finding where your customers are; it’s about finding where and when they engage with your brand. It’s important to try other channels and measure metrics on these channels to determine their value to your business rather than discarding them from the start.

You can be more efficient with your resources and divert your time to creating content that brings your business closer to the social media goals you’ve outlined. This is all about breaking away from a system, tearing down what you’ve been told to post or think you should post, and putting data at the heart of your social media strategy.

Ready to improve your social media game? Start by defining your goals and choosing the metrics that matter most to you. If you need specialist B2B social media agency support, contact our team today.