I started a social media campaign — now what?

You know your goals for your social media campaign (more Likes or Followers; increasing conversions by a certain percent in the next six months; reinforcing long-term brand loyalty). Your team has put together content and you are ready to see the results. But to achieve its goals, a social campaign requires more than selling your message to an audience and hoping they act. A successful social campaign has to create and build relationships.

You’ll get a sense of overall success by looking at each platform’s Analytics. Let’s focus on Facebook and Twitter, which both provide a plethora of statistics to examine. They’ll show you the number of likes, views, total reach, etc. But, one of the more important measurements to use is your “Engagement Rate,” the percentage of people who interact with your post. That can be a “like,” a comment or a “share/retweet,” and each is important because it means that not only did someone see your post, but they actually felt compelled to talk to you.

I’m interested now, how do I find my engagement rate — and what is considered good?

Facebook actually makes it quite easy to find (for Page Admins). Simply click on the “Insights” tab at the top of your business page. That brings you to an overview of your most recent posts, showing how many people you reached (organically or paid) and how many people engaged (interacted with your post in some way). In the “Engagement” column, you will see two numbers per post. Either add the two numbers together or click on the individual post to see your total number of engagements. Divide the number of engagements by the total number reached and you get the post’s engagement rate.

Twitter provides your overall monthly engagement rate when you click on “Analytics” by your profile picture at the top of your screen.

According to marketing expert Michael Leander, a “good” engagement rate on Facebook is generally over 1 percent, but best practice is to compare current posts to prior posts to see which ones are doing best. That will help you develop content that keeps on engaging your audience.

Really? 1 percent of my audience? How is that even worth my time/money/effort?

That 1 percent is incredibly important. Those are the people who are loyally following and interacting with your post (especially with Facebook). Facebook does this really cool trick where even if someone just likes a post or a page, they don’t have to share it — Facebook will. Any of their friends who have similar interests will potentially see your post/page/ad. So, in reality, that 1 percent turns into a much bigger number.

Okay, I’ve figured out what my general engagement rate is, but what now? How do I improve it?

Unfortunately, there’s not just one “fix” that dramatically improves your engagement rates. It’s all about trial and error. Simple content direction tweaks or timely posts can make a world of difference to a social media campaign (and take a whole other post to cover).