Measuring the Success of a Social Media Marketing Campaign

If you're trying to market your film via social media, it is critically important to have specific objectives and a way of measuring your success.

Why?

If you understand what worked on Facebook, Twitter and your website (and what didn't) you'll be able to tweak your campaign (if it still is underway) or at least make adjustments for the next one.

But what sort of objectives and metrics? And how should the results be reported? What should a post mortem report for a social media campaign look like?

To help you understand what sorts of objectives and metrics might work for a social media marketing campaign, let's look at a recent campaign built around a series of blogposts meant to promote the digital marketing company iAcquire.

In late 2012, to capitalize on the upcoming Christmas holiday, iAcquire embarked on a campaign built around helpful tips for anyone trying to increase the number of links to their website or blog. Basically, iAcquire asked 12 social media experts to share (one expert per day) their best tips for increasing inbound traffic - in a series of posts that iAcquire labelled "12 Days of Linkmas."

The goals for this 12 Days of Linkmas campaign?

iAcquire "wanted to drive traffic, brand awareness, social shares, generate leads, build links and grow the iAcquire twitter as well. We had also recently noticed that the traffic from social media was trending downward so it was also a goal to reverse that trend."

So - by offering 12 handy tips on their website - iAcquire hoped to build their brand up and get more action in social media - maybe even developing new leads for their business.

How did these general "goals" for a 12 day campaign translate into concrete "objectives?"

As illustrated in the month-long graph above, one metric was an increase in followers on Twitter. The folks at iAcquire also tracked likes, shares and comments for each post - leading to valuable information about who the most popular guest posters were. But they also found problem areas - e.g., no traction on Pinterest (the images they were making weren't getting shared via Pinterest, suggesting a rethink might be in order for the next set of images). And they didn't generate as many new leads as they might have (i.e., capturing email addresses was a weak point of the campaign).

Take a look at the full 12 Days of Linkmas Post-Mortem report here.

After reviewing the results of their 12 Days of Linkmas campaign, the folks at iAcquire decided to offer a complete list of tips - via a pdf that sits behind a fan-gate, ensuring that at least a few more leads will be developed and a few more email addresses captured from this campaign.

Thanks to Rand Fishkin, whose 12 Days of Linkmas post was hugely popular - for the link to the post mortem.