Social media marketing is the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites. The goal of SMM is to produce content that users will share with their social network to help a company increase brand exposure and broaden customer reach. With the rapid increase in social media advertising these days, one might wonder how do companies really measure the effectiveness of how well is the money and time spent on their Social media advertising? Measuring of our marketing strategy is essential to evaluate the performance of our marketing activities. It helps us to understand the gap between the projections made earlier and the reality. It comforts us to identify which of our activities yield the highest return on investment and which of them failed to. Here we have tried to briefly explain about how we can measure the effectiveness of Social Media Marketing.

Increased traffic? Higher brand awareness among users? Increased interaction on the brand’s page? Number of message shares/ retweets and favorites? Number of people who took a particular action, such as making a purchase? These are some of the measures that business uses to measure the effectiveness of its Social Media marketing strategy. But do these actually reflect the reality of our strategy? Tracking marketing effectiveness of these measures helps marketing departments determine whether their campaigns have been successful in compelling prospects to take a desired action. Marketers can then fine-tune their strategies in the midst of a campaign while keeping executive management posted on how Marketing is helping to fill the sales pipeline.

When it comes to assessing effectiveness of our marketing, the measure of its effectiveness, we don’t have any specific model on which we can rely upon. What and how we measure will vary based on your specific goals, type of organization and social networks that we are utilizing.  For instance, if you represent a not for profit organization and simply looking for awareness, then measure of increased traffic to our page, share will give us a glimpse about how effective we were. On the other hand, if we are a technology company who recently launched a new product, and then measure of people who made a purchase will be more significant.

Social Media can be a highly effective way to drive success for your business, but it requires a lot of effort and dedication. You will not likely get desired results right at the first time, but if you measure your activity effectively you will be able to identify how to constantly improve your efforts.

We have here discussed some tools which can be used to measure how effective are we in our Social Media marketing.

Page Insights

Facebook and Twitter Insights provide developers and Page owners with metrics about their content. By understanding and analyzing trends about usage and demographics as well as consumption and creation of content, you can be better equipped to improve your business and create better experiences on Facebook. Insights allow you to see the reach, engagement, and interactions for each individual post that you publish to your business page timeline.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free service that allows you to measure website traffic and website traffic flow. Website traffic is the amount of people visiting your site and website traffic flow takes into consideration the various ways people are navigating your site. Another cool feature of Google Analytics is the tool’s ability to show you which countries and states people are visiting your site from.

Klout

Klout is a tool to measure your company’s influence across multiple social networks. According to Klout, the influence you or your company has is the “ability to drive action”. It derives your Klout score, which ranges from 1 to 100, based on data from the size of your network, the content you provide, and how people interact with those contents. It measures activity on twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, google +, LinkedIn and takes an account actions such as comments, likes, Wall Posts on Facebook, retweets and mentions on twitter, comments and re-shares on google plus.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a social media management tool that links all of your social media accounts and allows for easy account management. With HootSuite, you can track brand mentions, analyze your social media traffic, and track the growth of your followers. Google Analytics and Facebook Insights can also be integrated into your HootSuite account, making the service even more valuable.