Using Tools to Help Evaluate Social Content

Evaluating the effectiveness of your social-media content is the best way to demonstrate its contribution to larger organizational goals. Clearly, social media has proven its worth as a core business strategy, but securing future budgets means effectively measuring, tracking, and improving. The platforms themselves offer tons of metrics, but it’s not always clear which metrics really matter. Luckily, connecting social content to revenue is possible, and there are tools to help. But, using those tools successfully — well, that’s another story.

Get the Most Out of Social Tools.
Here’s how to set yourself up for success by using the right tools to help align social metrics with larger initiative goals, better understand your social visitors, and optimize in ways that make sense for your brand.

Align Analytics With Social Content.
Instead of creating content to fill gaps between social initiatives, think of everything in social as a campaign and let the right tools help. How are you organizing your content? What is your strategy? What are the tactics you use to initiate that strategy? Start with clear goals. Understand the platforms you’re using and why you’re using them. How do people engage, and which specific metrics are offered on each platform? The idea is to align analytics with social content so that it’s easier to pull the data back out in a way that’s meaningful and actionable.

Tools are available that can help you align website analytics with social analytics, making it easy to associate all social content with a campaign. Publish a post with a link, and a tracking code is automatically appended, connecting all of that content with your campaign. This way, rather than having to move from Facebook insights to Twitter reports, for example, you can focus more on the larger initiative and less on the channels themselves. Assessing performance against goals at the campaign level is much easier. And, aligning analytics with social data makes for simple reporting — even as different team members each work on meeting his or her own benchmarks.

Combine Top Goals With Unified Metrics.
When social metrics are associated with a specific campaign, it’s easy to unify top goals. Tools are available that can automatically run classifications on your post IDs when they’re associated with campaigns. This helps you visualize the path to see what happens when you push social content out by campaign. Unified metrics means you’re able to look at both sides — owned social metrics as well as what users did when they visited the site — helping to bring top goals together.

Target Social Visitors With Meaningful Segments.
Once every piece of content is associated with a campaign, you can create more meaningful segments to apply that content in all kinds of different ways. When users visit your site from social sites, you’ll not only know which channels they came from, but also which pieces of content drove them. Then, you can use these social drivers to create more meaningful segments for those visitors — what are their specific interests, what are they doing, and what drives them to your site via social content.

While there are great tools available for using data in real time to segment audiences across multiple channels, when aligned with social metrics, the results are even better. By aligning social metrics with website analytics, it’s easy to create unified metrics that combine top goals, target social visitors more effectively with meaningful segments, and organize based on the tactics in your strategy to evaluate by campaign or across campaign instead of at the individual level.

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/using-tools-help-evaluate-social-content/