J. Michael BrowningSince I define myself as an analytical creative, I began this month with high expectations and was looking forward to a great learning experience. Sometimes, though, the experience is not what we expect them to be. Here are some things I learned from this month's course and why I believe it wasn't the right fit for my needs at this time in my career.
Three Things I Thought I Would Learn About Social Media Metrics
- How to measure the success of social media posts by using metrics such as likes, comments, shares, and impressions.
- The social media post-life cycle timeline - when should you post.
- What are some excellent tips for maximizing engagement on social media?
What is Taught, Doesn't Always Translate to Real World Usage
In most courses, they teach you the fundamentals. In a master's course, we should focus on actual world usage. This is because, in a master's course, you're more likely to have more experience in the subject matter, so the fundamentals are redundant. In a college-level course, students learn about social media for the first time and need to know how to use it.
But in a master's course, there needs to be something more applied. It's like teaching someone who knows how to drive a car how to drive a manual transmission car. They already have 95% of the fundamentals down, so why spend time reviewing what should already be known?
That should have made this course unique: instead of relying on writing APA-style reports, we should have focused on metrics, identifying patterns and trends that would otherwise be difficult to discern. Learning to identify and critcally apply this knowledge is far more valuable than determining whether an in-text citation is accurate.
What I Learned This Month
One of the most important things I learned this month is that social media campaign plans are necessary. Campaigns are designed to increase the reach of your content by focusing on specific audiences. This ensures your message resonates with those who need it most. It also helps you measure success with conversion rates, for example, clicks to sign-ups.
With a well-designed campaign plan, you can see which posts work best and which don't resonate well with your audience. You can then use this information to decide what content will be most successful in the future.
Capturing and presenting this information to a client in a campaign plan, pitch deck, or social media toolkit should be the preferred method – not an APA-style report.
Without Data, It's Just Your Opinion
The idea of this course was to learn what metrics should be identified when developing and tracking social media campaigns. What we learned was that there is no one metric that tells the whole story of what's going on with your account.
The more data points you have, the better your understanding of your social media campaign's performance. It also allowed us to think critically about our company's social media strategy by ensuring we were using data-driven decision-making.
Define Goals Before Starting
To achieve the goals of this course, I needed to learn how to measure my success with social media. The first step is determining what metrics would best suit my needs. Many metrics can be calculated, but picking the right ones will allow you to track your progress more effectively.
For example, if you are trying to determine which posts are widespread in terms of engagement, you might want to look at the number of likes per post or the total number of shares per post. Once you have determined which metrics work best for your business's strategy and goals, it is time to determine what ROI means for you.
Conclusion
The experience provided some insight into the importance of social media metrics. However, it was not what I was expecting. I took away the following:
- The business should know how its customers interact with them on social media sites.
- It is essential to track your engagement and interaction rates.
- Marketing needs to be in sync with business goals.
- Leverage analytics tools to track your performance metrics.
- Content and format matter