As the world gets more and more immersed in digital technology, engaging in social media has become equally essential to develop and cultivate an online presence.
Today the social media is gaining prominence in building brand awareness and making it easy to target various demographics. Paying for advertisements is a great way to target very specific groups of people who could be potential buyers.
Likes and Impressions are common metrics for measuring the performance of most types of online marketing campaigns and analysing these metrics is the only way of knowing if brand efforts are working.
Likes only signify the fact that a user pushed a button for a post but it is unknown if they truly “like” it. Motivations for likes can vary. While You may not like your sister’s boyfriend, You may “like” the post to show that friends and family are happy for her. Societal forces have the potential of wielding influence on people’s “liking” behavior.
Because Likes can be fickle, a post may attract thousands of likes, but if there is no intended action, it becomes inconsequential. Likes may certainly help if one is trying to generate brand awareness. There is however no direct correlation or formula to show that likes lead to a sale or how it does. A call to action is simply the bottomline and it may just be “visit our website” or “give us a call.”
Impressions on the other hand refer to the number of times an ad or content has been displayed on a screen. For example, if an ad from the previous example popped up on those people’s screens a total of 300 times, the number of impressions for that ad is 300.
Impressions are important in determining what content is catchy and interesting enough to be viewed by the most people the most times. Those with low reach can use impressions to determine what posts are interesting to their audience and can increase reach from that point.
These Impressions are also important when a brand wants to track its ads on a moment-to-moment basis. If it deploys an ad and it immediately gets few to no impressions, that could be an early sign that there’s something wrong with its framing or content.
While likes, reach and impressions don’t equal ROI, they certainly play a role in it. A like represents support. It’s a user’s way of expressing approval or showing solidarity and not growth on its own.
There are several metrics employed in measuring traffic to sites and potential buyers of products and services online; these include Likes, Reach, Impressions, Shares etc.
For marketers, measuring the return on investment for social media programs isn’t usually an easy task. While many businesses are increasing resources to different social platforms, others are busy trying to determine whether these investments are worth it.
It’s hard to see how much revenue a post has brought in, or whether a tweet has increased a brand’s bottom line.
Without measuring ROI however, a brand won’t know where to improve efforts, it won’t know whether the platform is bringing in revenue for the business or how specific changes impact a brand’s goals. A social media strategy should not be implemented blindly. ROI isn’t always tangible, but tracking it is possible.
While a brand’s established goals and the metrics used in defining and tracking ROI should be measurable, the focus of a brand’s marketing strategy should not strictly be growing numbers. It should rather be on building a community, otherwise more harm than good is done.
Designing content with the sole purpose of getting Likes, shares and clicks won’t mean much if the people who are Liking, sharing and clicking have no intention of becoming customers. Building a community of engaged customers and designing content with them in mind is the sure and right way to go.
Instead of focusing on likes, shares, and followers, marketers must find meaningful data that reveals whether their content is working.
Most businesses measure engagement, which includes views, likes, and shares. A smaller percentage of firms measure conversions, including revenue and goal conversions. A much smaller percentage of firms measure amplification, while a meager percentage measure customer service metrics.
Surprisingly, the most popular metric analyzed by firms investing in paid campaigns isn’t directly related to sales. Those using paid campaigns are focusing on audience reach and growth, clicks to website, and engagement. Even with a firms’ financial investment in the social campaigns, the more important of all, which is the conversion rate takes last priority.
A common goal behind every social media campaign is increased engagement. If a brand’s content isn’t getting likes, replies or shares, then something is probably not right, either with the creation or targeting end.
When a brand’s impressions rise, that may likely be due to its content surfacing more frequently into users’ feeds.
Apparently the focus of social media marketing is on likes, comments, impressions, or shares but they are vague and the focus must go beyond that. While shares allow the opportunity for a post to reach more people and likes have more significance than impressions; what they mean to a business or how they impact a business varies, and those interactions do not necessarily encourage users to leave social media and take action. A dozen likes does not mean someone made a purchase which makes the call to action very important.
Posts having links that encourage users to interact with a brand, which can be achieved by creating a custom link that tracks the number of likes, impressions, clicks or monitor website traffic, as well as prioritising conversion would be more apt in making Likes and Impressions bear more significance on ROI in digital advertising.
For a brand to draw a direct line between ad spend and ROI, it should pair reach and impression metrics with conversion and revenue data. Such brands must make sure to connect reach to more concrete measures, like sign-ups and revenue.
