What matters most: massive impact or ongoing success?

Leaving your project unattended means it stagnates and loses momentum. 

When it comes to measuring success you should strive for a campaign that just keeps on giving. Having a massive impact can yield short term results but experiencing a long term high will provide a succession of positive outcomes.  

In this graph we can see a selection of campaigns for tourist boards. By tracking the conversation we can see that Campaign A experienced a sudden impact, which resulted in a surge of mentions.  

However, that fizzled out pretty quickly which meant it soon lost momentum. In comparison Campaign B and C both had campaigns that built steadily over time.  

They maintained the online chatter and eventually beat the success of Campaign A. 

By inspiring long term conversation the effect was a maintained momentum. 

Richness in reaction 

Mentions alone are not indicative to the success of a social campaign. 

The online conversations need to be relevant and relate to the products or messages a company is trying to get across. 

Taking a look at the same tourist campaigns again we can see that campaign C had the most relevant tweets in relation to vacations.  

To pinpoint the relevancy of the chat around a campaign you must identify the elements of the conversation that does not relate to the main offerings but simply comment on the trivial or obscure aspects.

When you dive deeper into the data you can also differentiate between the conversations that show true purchase intent.

It is crucial to dig below the surface of the numbers to unearth the true impact of a campaign.  By using a social listening tool companies can slice and dice the data for a more precise results. 

Measure the results from your social campaigns

There are several ways that social media monitoring tools can be used to track the success of a media campaign.

Categories

Having a custom dashboard for each campaign will allow for the measurement of different aspects of the campaign. 

It may be that there are several different media resources implemented in the release of a campaign – TV adverts, print content, online content or other types of marketing. By segmenting the data into categories, these can be monitored and compared separately or in relation to the campaign as a whole. 

Topics

Monitoring the main themes surrounding the campaign will establish if it is ticking the key responses you are expecting. 

The topics feature of your social listening platform will confirm to you what themes had the biggest amount of mentions.

You can further segment this data into categories and sub-categories for an in-depth look at the different aspects which make up your marketing drive. 

Sentiment 

Looking at the sentiment of online reactions will help you to determine if your campaign has had a positive or negative reception. 

If negativity occurs a change in tactics will be needed to regain control of the campaign. 

Being a flexible marketer is essential for reaching your goals. Deviating away from your plans may be the only way to turn around a failing campaign. 

Campaign analysis is only one of the benefits that social media monitoring offers a business. There are many more ways that you can use social listening to improve your practices. Stick around for more insight on the subject.