When it comes to promoting an event, or facilitating participation, social media plays an integral role. However, it’s equally as important to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing for an event. How else will you know if your efforts were successful? While it may sound like a complicated task, measuring social media success for your event isn’t difficult. Read on for some tips and advice to start tracking your social media event marketing efforts!
Measuring Social Media Success for Events
- Know your goals and objectives
In order to know how successful your social media event marketing is, you have to begin with a solid foundation—your social media strategy. A well-thought out plan always involves your goals and objectives. These are important because they are related to the overall goals for your event. By outlining these goals and objectives, you’ll know exactly what you want to achieve, and therefore, what you’re going to measure. If you’ve never created one, here’s a quick introduction to social media strategy for events.
A goal could simply be to sell tickets through social media, and the objective would be to sell a certain amount by a specific date. The key is to be specific and realistic, and to ensure that the objectives are measurable.
- Determine metrics and KPIs
The next step is to outline your metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) in order to measure your success. Keep in mind that metrics and KPIs can’t be used interchangeably; there is a distinction between the two. KPIs can be considered a metric, but not all metrics are KPIs.
While the difference between a KPI and a metric can get confusing, remember that KPIs are methods used for measuring success. They also measure progress towards business (or event) goals, and most importantly, they lead to action. Essentially, KPIs impact the bottom-line of the event, and must be tied back to your goals and objectives.
A few popular metrics for measuring social media success include:
- Number of likes/followers
- Link clicks
- Engagement (likes, comments, shares)
- Mentions
- Hashtag usage by attendees
- Reach and impressions
Examples of KPIs to determine the impact of your social media event marketing efforts include:
- Social media share rate
- Click thru rate (CTR)
- Sales per channel
- Follower growth rate
The KPIs and metrics you use to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing for your event will come down to what your goals and objectives are. While KPIs impact the bottom-line, picking the right metrics are also necessary because they’ll help you understand how well your content resonated with event attendees, or determine who your brand advocates are.
Read Webris’ article, 50 Digital Marketing KPIs Analytics Demystified, to calculate a few of the KPIs listed above. To learn more about the fundamentals of KPIs, read Optimize Smart’s guide on understanding key performance indicators.
- Determine your cost per visitor acquisition
A good indicator that your social media event marketing was successful is by determining how many attendees purchased their tickets via social media advertising. The KPI associated with this is your cost per visitor acquisition. This can be tracked by using UTM links, which will help you determine from where traffic to your ticketing site originated. From there, you can determine your cost per visitor acquisition with this formula:
- Use the right measurement and monitoring tools
The best part about social media event marketing is the plethora of free tools and paid services that are available. Aside from using Google Analytics, leverage the use of native social media analytics or insights tools as well. Such tools include:
- Facebook Insights
- Twitter Analytics
- Google Business Insights
- LinkedIn Analytics
Monitoring tools will also go a long way in helping you tune into the online chatter and overall sentiment about your event. For this reason, it’s essential to establish an event hashtag to easily track conversations specific to your event. If you’re new to it, here are 5 tips on how to create a hashtag for an event.
As mentioned, tracking mentions is a good metric to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing as it gives you an idea of your attendees’ online participation. While this might be a bit tedious, you can also determine the overall sentiment surrounding your event. In order to track your event, and the conversations surrounding it, you’ll need to use the right monitoring tools. Here’s a mix of free and paid services you can use:
- NUVI
As an event entertainment company that offers social media reporting services, we know how important it is to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing for your event. By tracking your social media event marketing efforts, you’ll have a better understanding of where you can improve. Most importantly, you’ll have a well-rounded idea of how successful and impactful your event was in all areas.
Happy measuring,
TapSnap
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