Evaluating Social Media Campaigns

Article 4 min
An organized social media campaign evaluation process is critical to the overall success of the campaign. Review these strategies to learn how to navigate the evaluation stage of a campaign effectively and improve your team's campaign evaluation approach.

When evaluating your social media campaign, you will be conducting three distinct phases known as the Three A's of the Evaluation Process:

  • Analytics: Measuring the campaign's performance by collecting and analyzing data.
  • Analysis: Asking questions to better understand what's working, what's not and where the public stands.
  • Assessment: Applying the findings by making improvements and adjustments.

Effective evaluation is performed before, during and after a campaign. It is essential for social media managers overwatching campaigns to perform evaluations to ensure better chances of having a successful campaign. To better set yourself up for success, follow these best practices to evaluate your next social media campaign effectively.

  • Set SMART objectives (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound).
  • Establish a comparative baseline.
  • Plan strategies that align with campaign objectives.
  • Document how activities will lead to change.
  • Stay consistent and continuous.
  • Make the evaluation process iterative.
  • Use all available resources.

Dive deeper into each best practice below to understand how to apply it when assessing and evaluating a social media campaign.

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Campaign Assessment Methods

Objectives

Objective setting is an absolute prerequisite to evaluating a social media campaign. The best social media campaign objectives are SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

Well-defined objectives will help you to better evaluate the communication impact of a social media campaign. Some examples of clearly established SMART objectives when evaluating a social media campaign could be:

  • Improve brand awareness by increasing mentions and shares by 3% over the next six months.
  • Increase the number of followers by at least 50 people weekly by adding more video content.
  • Utilize more visually engaging content in order to decrease the bounce rate by 2% monthly.

Baseline

When evaluating a social media campaign, you must understand how your social media platforms perform regularly. This will help you understand your baseline.

Your baseline will be your reference point when evaluating your campaign. Compare the metrics from the objectives that were set for the campaign before, during and after the campaign to understand what impacts the campaign had.

Additionally, you can conduct a content analysis to establish a comparative baseline and evaluate the impact of a social media campaign. A content analysis is a quantitative research method that involves the observation of media sources to quantify programs and messages communicated through the media to determine how messages are being received by the public.

Plan

Planning your evaluation strategies is imperative when evaluating a social media campaign. This effort allows you to answer the question, “Did the social media campaign help achieve the command's goal?"

A/B testing is a common planning strategy that can be implemented during a campaign. Plan out different A/B tests to determine what aspects of your content perform better during a campaign. Additionally, use the free analytic tools that most social media platforms offer that can help you measure things such as:

  • Traffic
  • Conversion rate
  • Click-through rate
  • Engagement rate

Conduct social media monitoring and listening, or the process of gathering and processing information from your social media channel, to inform decision-making. It is also important to understand and identify your audience. Your audience, the public, cares about themselves, so make them the heroes of your campaigns.

Change

When evaluating a social media campaign, it is important to understand how the campaign will lead to change or an outcome. Outcomes are a measurement of what actually changed as a result of the campaign. These are the behavioral changes that over time validate any other desired knowledge or attitude changes.

Measure what actually changed as a result of the campaign and identify any effects they had on business impact. Public behavioral changes can validate the desired knowledge or attitude changes.

It can sometimes be difficult to notice change. Surveys, research, good internal cooperation and an integrated approach can help you decipher the change.

Consistent

During a social media campaign, measuring and evaluating should be transparent, consistent and correct. Communication measurement and evaluation are foundational in integrity and transparency in order to drive learning and insights. Be sure to apply rigor to data collection and analysis, and define metrics transparently.

Additionally, always measure the number of impressions from the public and the quality of coverage, like tone of voice, relevance for the public or mention of a spokesperson.

Iterative

Your social media campaign should not become static; it should always stay fluid. It should evolve as you learn more about the public's preferences and trends.

  • Continue to refine strategies.
  • Constantly review your campaign's metrics.
  • Make adjustments based on the data to continually optimize your campaign.

Resources

In order to perform and evaluate a successful media campaign, it is crucial to have and utilize various resources, such as the internal analytics and metrics provided by social media platforms, to better optimize your campaign.

The quality of your campaign is constrained by budget, timeline and scope. At the end of a campaign, evaluate your use of resources by understanding if:

  • You stayed within budget.
  • Your timeline yielded measurable results.
  • You stayed within the scope of the objectives that were set for the campaign.

Having met these constraints, you most likely produced a successful social media campaign.

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