Effectiveness

In the context of social media, effectiveness is the measure of how well a certain action, strategy, campaign, or piece of content achieves its critical outcomes and objectives, such as increasing engagement, driving traffic, building brand awareness, and achieving sales goals. Put another way, a piece of content is effective if it fulfills the purpose for which it was created, relative to the amount of time, money, and human resources invested in it. In general, effectiveness on social media is more about achieving certain results than about achieving certain outputs.

For instance, if a post is seen but not liked, shared, or engaged with in some other way, then the effectiveness of that post is low, even though it may have reached numerous eyeballs. Typically, social media effectiveness is tied to how well particular activity resonates with a certain audience, nudging that audience toward some kind of interaction or behavior that serves the brand. Measuring effectiveness can be a little tricky and usually involves some combination of these tactics: looking at engagement rates (likes, comments, shares); looking at impressions-to-action ratios (how many people saw something and then did something); and returning to the qualitative assessment previously discussed, which is considering the relevance and resonance of the audience reached and judging the depth of the interaction (or non-interaction) the content elicited.