During your digital marketing training, you must have learned several metrics that give you insight into how social media campaigns are performing and what returns they are giving. When you actually start tracking the analytics, it can get an overwhelming exercise. You may feel at loss on proving to your customers how your social media strategy is reaping the desired results.

It is imperative to pick the right metrics and track only what really matters. Here is your quick guide to understanding it further.

Determine the Social Media Goal

What is the goal of the brand’s social media strategy? Setting goals will outline the expectations clearly. Ideally, these goals should be specific – get 10k likes in a month or drive a footfall of 2k on the website. But, if the brand is new in the market or has launched a new product, the goal may be to create a buzz.

Shortlist the Social Media Channels

A professional travel photographer would benefit more from Instagram while a B2B organization can get grow the business by generating leads from LinkedIn. Select the social media channel(s) (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+, etc) where the brand is likely to get a number of users and engagement. The next step would be to identify the content types that the brand would like to push – blogs, white papers, e-books, infographics, images, videos or SlideShare.

So, in the case of the travel photographer, a blog (content-type) on his or her travel experiences featuring photographs (content-type) of the location can be shared both on Facebook (social media channel) as well as Instagram (social media channel).

Decide the Metrics That Need to be Measured

Social media analytics can generate mines of data you may find difficult to navigate through. The good news is that since each social media channel has its own metrics, your half job is done. Had you been randomly promoting the brand on any channel using any content type, you wouldn’t have been to decide the specific metrics to monitor. Now, you only need to select metrics which enable the brand in the decision-making.

For example, Facebook has metrics such as a number of likes, post reach and number of page views. If the social media goal is to increase the page likes, this is what is to be measured. If the number of likes is less than expected, you will have to think ways of boosting them.

Whether you are a novice or an expert in social media metrics, it is always a good idea to enhance your knowledge further with online digital marketing courses. These courses include detailed modules on social media metrics to make even the most complex concepts easy to understand.