Evaluating your social media campaign 

The evaluation part of a social media campaign is often just as important as the campaign itself as it provides insights of consumer behaviours, sales data, and the failures and successes of the strategies and tactics implemented. This is crucial to your company's future as it will help determine how the next campaign should run based on an analysis of previous campaigns.

People typically associate evaluations with the end of a project, however, it is important to have regular, ongoing evaluations of your social media campaign to see if any changes should be made earlier. Ongoing analytic tools can be already integrated into the social media platform such as Facebook insights, Youtube and Twitter analytics, or can be third-party apps such as Buffer Analyse, Sprout Social, and Zoho Social.

You can learn a lot about how your campaign is being received from measuring important metrics and KPIs. These include:

• Engagement: The number of Likes, Comments, Shares, profile visits, and account mentions.
• Follower or subscription decline/growth.
• Reach and awareness: the amount of people you have reached both within and outside your audience.
• Optimal times for engagement: daily activity and which days of the week your followers are most active.
• Audience demographic: age, location, interests, gender, etc. of your audience.
• Referral traffic: how many customers have come from your social media pages to your website.
• Social conversions: when someone makes a purchase from visiting your social media page.
• Click rates: number of clicks received on each post, showing which posts are more popular.

It is also useful to gather qualitative data by reading comments and replies to understand the overall customer sentiment towards your business and releasing customer feedback surveys. Survey questions could ask customers what they thought about the company, products, or services before and after the campaign, what they think could be improved, and how likely they are to recommend the company to a friend.

After gathering all this data, it is a good idea to create a social media campaign report, as well as graphs and charts to analyse the information and determine what parts of the campaign were successful, and what aspects could be improved.