Defining success in social media marketing begins with understanding your business objectives, aligning your social strategy to those goals, and consistently measuring your efforts.

We have listed the top 4 goals that many businesses use and a technique for successfully tracking these goals.

Note: It is important to set SMART goals for your campaigns.

Goal 1: Increase brand awareness
Brand awareness assists your target audience to recognise, remembering, and relating to your business. The more that people know about your brand, the more of your product or service you will sell. 

Measuring brand awareness: Check your potential reach and impressions. These metrics can be checked weekly, monthly, or per campaign.

Goal 2: Boost brand engagement
Indicates how effectively your business is creating interactions with its audience in the social space. Use engagement rates to determine audience health (how responsive your audience is and how many are “real” followers), and the types of content that your audience finds interesting.

Measuring brand engagement: Analyse the number of people that like, share, mention, and comment on your posts.

Goal 3: Drive traffic to your website
Consistent engagement with your audience can boost traffic to your website. Make sure to include links to your website in your social media posts.

Measuring website traffic: Google Analytics is the easiest tool for tracking website traffic from your social channels. To check this metric, log into your Analytics account -> go to Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Social.

Goal 4: Generate new leads
Generating leads on social media has become an essential part of marketing for businesses today. Social media is where businesses promote their campaigns and can be a gold mine for generating leads.

Measuring new leads: Leads may reach you in various forms such as someone commenting on a post, responding to an event, or sending a private message on your channel. If you are promoting your adverts, Facebook and LinkedIn use a built-in customisable form to capture your lead details and store that information on a downloadable spreadsheet. In addition to this, you can set up conversion tracking on Google Analytics.