3 Successful Social Media Campaigns and How To Report on Performance

All successful social media campaigns begin with clearly defined objectives and conclude with a report on whether or not those objectives were achieved. What does success look like? This will ultimately depend on your business goals — if a brand is focused on boosting e-commerce sales for a particular product, your goal might focus on social traffic to a specific landing page. If you’re trying to diversify your consumer base, you might hone in audience growth among a specific demographic. 

Whatever your goal, there's no doubt that reporting isn't the most exciting part of the job and is often very time-consuming and laborious. However, marketers who find the most effective process for reporting on their campaigns can save time, gain streamlined insights into what works and doesn't, and ultimately demonstrate the results of their efforts. And the best part? If done well, it may even turn out to be the most rewarding aspect of the job.

We provide you with examples of three successful social campaigns, insights into how measuring the success of social media campaigns can be optimized and, subsequently, how to present your internal stakeholders with a meaningful campaign performance report.

What Is a Social Campaign?

A social media campaign is a social strategy centred on a specific business focus. This might be a seasonal campaign, to launch a new product, or any other goal your business has honed in on, where social media could contribute to success — using a guide to social media campaigns will help your efforts and ensure your social team is on the right track. 

For example, perhaps your brand offers a service that no one is taking advantage of — this is a great opportunity to launch a campaign on social to educate and promote the service to your followers. 

When the campaign is over, you can measure the impact social had on the overall campaign objective.

What Is a Social Media Campaign Performance Report?

The key to effective social media marketing is to report reporting on anything of value. And to truly understand what you're achieving through social media, you need to track and analyze your performance. Having data showing the importance of your work to your organization is essential fort to demonstrate the value of your social marketing efforts to your superiors and team. 

Reports typically take the form of documents, requiring teams to spend hours and days assembling data from different platforms, tools, and spreadsheets. Often, the social media campaign analysis report will have to be customized to suit the audience, resulting in multiple versions. Many savvy marketers, however, use single tools that provide data on their social media activities and optimize their marketing campaigns accordingly. One such tool is Dash Hudson, which simplifies campaign reporting and helps teams uncover the ROI of their cross-channel campaigns and media. More on that later. To start, let's examine what makes the most successful social campaigns reporting-wise.

What To Include in Your Campaign Report

As previously mentioned, your social media campaign report may exist in multiple versions, so what you include depends on who you are presenting it to. That said, it is likely that your audience will always be interested in three key elements — the overview, success metrics, and results. 

You can create a comprehensive social media campaign report by following these steps:

Step 1: Outline Your Social Media Campaign Strategy

Give a quick overview of your social media strategy at the beginning of your report. The purpose of this is to provide context so that your audience knows what to expect from the remainder of the report. You may want to save the details for later, but this is the place to describe your social activities' overall purpose and how they relate to the broader business strategy — you should always connect your efforts back to the wider picture. You can also use the outline to highlight previous successes, challenges, and barriers you have overcome since the last report. 

This section sets the tone, so keep it brief, informative, and clear. Take advantage of this opportunity to showcase what you have been working on, so be proud and see things in a broader context.

Step 2: Identify Success Metrics

It's time to get more specific by diving into numbers. Break down the overall strategy you presented in the intro into specific, quantifiable goals. Again, how many goals you include in your report will depend on who you're presenting to. If you're presenting to your team, you may want to include all metrics, no matter how small. However, if you are presenting to stakeholders outside your team, you might want to pick 3-5 metrics that are general, but paint a clear picture about how they support your business objective. 

Here are a few metrics you can use to get started:

Engagement

Engagement is considered a tough metric to benchmark and is defined individually by every brand, not to mention measured differently. Often, brands prefer metrics such as likes and views, but comments and shares are becoming increasingly important as engagement indicators. Dash Hudson’s effectiveness rate measures the percentage of users who saw and engaged with your post. The formula divides them by reach based on likes, comments, saves, and video views. The effectiveness of your content is calculated by taking into account users who have accessed your content through the algorithm, as opposed to engagement, which takes into account only your followers. In contrast to your profile alone, it provides a more detailed picture of how that content is performing across the channel.

Awareness

Yet another challenging metric is the seemingly unattainable awareness goal. Impressions, mentions, and quantifying how many people the campaign reached cross-channel are likely to be the best starting points. 

Total Revenue Generated

To drive traffic from social, increase conversion rates on site, and ultimately grow your business, you need to focus on encouraging consumers to check out. One of the most important metrics you can report is how much your social campaign contributed to these figures. Dash Hudson’s link in bio solution, LikeShop, and product tagging features are just some social commerce tools that can help boost your conversions.

ROI

The ROI of your social campaigns is also an essential part of your report. It helps others recognize your work's impact, illustrate its value, and optimize your strategy over time to maximize returns. For example, if your campaign has involved creators and influencers, this is an appropriate place to discuss the results. Dash Hudson’s Relationships feature removes manual tracking and seamlessly measures the ROI of your partnership programs by helping you understand which are delivering results and which should be reconsidered. This section is also a great place to summarize the costs of the campaign, including advertising spending.

Step 3: Analyze Results by Channel

Once you’ve determined some relevant metrics, you’ll need to make them specific to each social channel used in your campaign. Each social channel has its own metrics, which means that results are tracked differently depending on the platform. Here's a breakdown of what these could look like for Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Measuring Instagram Results

Since Instagram is one of the biggest social channels, you likely included it in your campaign since it provides marketers with a lot of analytics, especially with Stories and Reels. You can precisely target with your content if you get granular with what you hope to accomplish, so make sure to use regular Instagram insights to help you determine what resonates with audiences on the platform.

Top metrics:

• Reach and impressions
• Engagement
• Profile visits
• Follows
• Shares
• Website taps and profile actions
• Saves 
• Video views
• Story completion rate

Measuring TikTok Results

TikTok is one of the most popular social networks for brands to experiment with campaigns and reach new audiences. Its algorithm is the formula used to determine what content appears on the audiences For You page, so success on this platform is measured differently, with entertainment at the forefront of user engagement. Take the time to learn how to use TikTok for business before launching your campaigns, then use TikTok Insights to drive them forward.

Top metrics:

• Video views
• Profile views
• Traffic source
• Followers
• Likes
• Saves
• Comments
• Average watch time
• Referral traffic
• Post reach percentage
• Cost per result

And more, including Dash Hudson’s Entertainment Score

Measuring YouTube Social Media Campaign Results

With YouTube's 15-year history as a video-driven channel, marketers have access to the largest selection of analytics available. Seeing how many indicators can be tracked can be overwhelming; however, it also allows you to craft your video content to the highest standard. Again, consider which YouTube insights truly matter for your campaign and align them closer to your broader channel strategy.

Top metrics:

• Impressions CTR 
• Traffic sources
• Views
• Comments
• Watch time
• Average view duration
• Returning/unique viewers and subscribers
• Demographics, geography, and top devices used
• Subscriber status, source, and growth rate
• Likes and dislike, including the like to dislike ratio

Measuring Facebook Social Media Campaign Results

As one of the most sophisticated in-feed advertising platforms, marketers will spend much of their time analyzing ROI versus organic insights to measure the effectiveness of campaigns on Facebook. While Facebook introduces new features like Reels and the types of content users engage with most have changed in the era of social entertainment, it's still important to keep an eye on the additional Facebook Insights to get a complete picture.

Top metrics:

• Engagement 
• Reach
• Impressions
• Followers
• CTR
• Cost per conversion and thousand impressions
• Video views
• Retention
• Demographics

Measuring Twitter Social Media Campaign Results

Measuring social media performance on Twitter is nuanced, especially since it is a top source of user-generated content. Twitter provides insight into your most powerful followers and brand mentions, indicators of influencers you can utilize to boost your brand's visibility. There are a variety of useful Twitter Insights you can use to measure the success of your campaigns.

Top metrics:

• Top tweets
• Engagement 
• Link clicks
• New followers
• Top followers and mentions 
• Video views
• Profile clicks
• Conversion
• CTR
• CPR
• Cost per mille

Measuring Pinterest Social Media Campaign Results

Analytics are essential for Pinterest since it feeds your content directly into its engine, and you can miss out on valuable business opportunities if your content isn't being discovered. Brands have grown to rely heavily on it for traffic referrals, but marketers often overlook it as a valuable campaign asset. Ensure that you understand the Pinterest Insights you need as part of your social media marketing campaign, and let it do the heavy lifting.

Top metrics:

• Saves
• Impressions
• Top-converting pins
• Outbound clicks
• Demographics
• Top boards
• Followers driven

Recognize Your Wins and Spot Opportunities

It's time for the best part. This is the moment to bring all the information in the report together and highlight the most noteworthy successes. As you consider your next campaign, recognize what didn't go as planned and use that as an opportunity to improve. It's all about celebrating and being transparent at the same time.

3 Successful Social Media Campaigns

Spotify Unwrapped 

Spotify Unwrapped launched in 2016, is a great example of UGC. For those unfamiliar, Spotify releases playlists each year based on their user’s most played songs and artists in a top 10 list — they also offer customized listener profiles so users can share what kind of listener they are, a playlist of your top 100 songs of the year, plus if you’re a top listener of a particular artist. 

Spotify Unwrapped offers users social assets in multiple colors to choose from, all with their individual facts and figures present, which allows users to select the post that fits most with their online aesthetic. 

But the real benefit? Not only did their app downloads increase by 21% in December 2020, their socials experienced a huge increase in UGC content. In 2019, the Unwrapped Campaign resulted in over 30 million social shares, over billion views on TikTok, 2.7 billion YouTube impressions, and it held the no. 1 trend on Twitter position for 2 days. 

In 2022, searches for ‘spotify wrapped’ spiked as early as November 2022, a month before the playlists were even released. 

• ‍Campaign Success Highlight: UGC content creation

iHob 

Not only did this campaign drive burger sales (a 400% increase), it also provided an immense amount of UGC and engagement for the brand. iHOP wanted to show they take burgers as seriously as they did pancakes — so, what did they do? Released a tweet that read, “For 60 pancakin’ years, we’ve been iHOP. Now, we’re flippin’ our name to iHOb. Find out what it could b on 6.11.18. #IHOb” The GIF accompanying the article teased the launch date, and flipped the classic ‘p’ to a ‘b’.

This sparked social buzz. Their followers wondered if the pancake restaurant would actually change their name — the initial tweet alone resulted in 614,000 tweets and 2.1 million conversations on social. 

• ‍Campaign Highlights: Engagement increase

Carlsberg

Sometimes, the best way to connect with your audience is to simply love what they love. In 2019, beverage company Carlsberg launched a Facebook campaign to support Liverpool Football Club in the 2010 Champions League Final. Not only did they show their support on social, but they enlisted Liverpool FC Manager Jurgen Klopp to record a video message for their audience.  

They increased their return on investment by 19%, and saw an overall 9% increase in website traffic — all with a single-channel campaign. 

• Campaign Highlights: ROI 

Social Media Reporting by Dash Hudson

Dash Hudson's reporting solution simplifies campaign reporting regardless of your campaigns' complexity. With the tool, you can effortlessly measure ROI for cross-channel and media campaigns by connecting to Google Analytics, track your key insights, see what drives success, and optimize your future campaigns for social commerce accordingly. Our integrated insights also give you a holistic view of your campaign performance across owned, earned, and creator media to share across your team and organization.

FAQs

What social media campaigns were successful?

The success of a social media campaign depends entirely on the goals the company set. To determine whether a campaign was successful, compare the results with the initial objectives. Analyzing real-time metrics while the campaign is running is crucial, as it allows you to pivot and change strategies according to the goals.

What are examples of social media campaigns?

Most social media campaigns revolve around seasonal initiatives or product launches. Black Friday, for example, is a time when brands run campaigns to lure consumers into taking advantage of significant discounts. In contrast, product launch campaigns focus on promoting and teasing a specific upcoming product to provide consumers with all the information they need to purchase when it launches.

How do you successfully run a social media campaign?

How to create a successful social media campaign is one of the most common questions marketers ask. The most effective campaigns on social media begin with a clear understanding of purpose and goals. Then make sure you have access to all the insights you need for measuring results and ultimately understanding if the goals are being met. Lastly, report on the results, celebrate successes and identify opportunities for improvement.