The 4 Stages of Social Media Marketing Success Metrics

What defines the success of your social media marketing? Some may call their brand successful on social media if they have great number of followers. Some may say followers are useless if you don’t have enough engagement.

So, what is the right success metrics for social media marketing? The answer is, social media marketing has till date witnessed 4 stages of success metrics. In each stage we saw the rise and downfall of each metric. Currently we are in the 4 th stage. Let’s get into the details.

Stage 1: The followers and the likes

Rise
During the first stage, that is, during the initial years, number of followers and likes was extremely important. All brands, big and small, directed their efforts towards increasing the follower base and getting maximum likes.

Downfall
However, soon marketers and media Companies realised that there’s more to social media marketing than just that. All your followers may not see your messages if they are not using the platform at the time the chronological news feed displays your message. Which meant that the number of likes could not be relied on too.

Stage 2: Reach

Rise
As the marketers realised that followers and likes can’t be relied on for measuring success, everyone directed their efforts towards ‘the reach’, a new metric. The reach means nothing but how many followers actually see your messages. Now, it was all about making sure that the most number of your followers actually see your messages.

Downfall
Then came a time when marketers and creative agencies realised that just reaching the followers is not enough, simply because, these followers can easily scroll past the messages and not engage with it. Which showed that even the metric of reach is flawed.

Stage 3: Engagement

Rise
After that, the marketers realised that the metric that should matter to all the most is engagement. Every social media effort is only worth it when people, be it current followers or not, actually generated interaction in terms of likes, comments, retweets, shares etc.

Downfall
Even though engagement as a metric did not see the downfall, certain tactics used to artificially boost engagement such as engagement-baiting has already seen a downfall. For instance, platforms like Facebook announced severe measures against those trying to cheat their algorithm.

Stage 4: Next steps

Rise
Consider, your goal is to get maximum traffic to your website. Then engagement in terms of likes, comments and shares is not going to help you unless followers really take the next step of actually visiting your website. That’s why ‘next steps’ currently is considered extremely important as a metric.

Current stage
This particular metric is the success metric of the current stage we are in. Most marketers are trying their best to get people to take the ‘next steps’ and going by the current trends, it looks like this metric is here to stay for long.

If you are looking for media agencies in India to make your social media marketing a success, then you must connect with Brand Bazooka, a marketing and advertising company in Delhi, which has helped many brands get the social media success that they aimed for.