How to Tell If Your Social Media Marketing Is Actually Working (and When to Bring in Help)

Recently we have been covering topics in social media marketing. In our last blog post we went over a playbook for Reels, TikTok, and YouTube shorts. This post is to tell you how to make sure your social media is actually working. If you’ve been posting on social media for your business but have no idea whether it is moving the needle in your business, this post is for you.

Most social media platforms are designed to show you metrics that look impressive. They’re not always designed to show you metrics that matter to your business. Here’s how to tell the difference.

The metrics most people are watching (and what they’re missing)

When you log into Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok, the numbers front and center are usually reach, impressions, follower growth, and likes. These are often called vanity metrics. They measure traffic to your account, but don’t measure interest, intent, or revenue. That doesn’t mean they’re useless though. Reach tells you how many people saw your content. Impressions tell you how many times it appeared. Follower growth tells you your audience is expanding. These numbers have value as leading indicators, but they are not business results on their own. They let you know you have an active and growing audience. Let’s look at the metrics that mean something for your business.

The metrics that actually connect to your business

These are the numbers worth paying attention to.

1. Saves and shares: When someone saves your post, they’re telling you, themselves, and the platform that it was worth coming back to. When someone shares it, they’re putting their name behind it. These are the strongest engagement signals available on most platforms. Likes are passive. Saves and shares are intentional and tell you your content is valued by your audience.
2. Profile visits and link clicks: After someone watches your video or reads your post, did they want to know more? Profile visits and link clicks tell you whether your content is generating curiosity about your business, not just your content. This is the step between someone seeing you and someone considering you.
3. Website traffic from social. This one requires you to look outside the social platform itself. In Google Analytics, you can see how many sessions came from social media. If you’ve been posting for six months and your analytics show zero traffic arriving from social, that’s a signal worth taking seriously.
4. Direct messages and inquiries. This is the most underrated metric in local business social media. If someone watched your video and sent you a message asking about your services, that is a lead. It often goes untracked, but it’s real. Keep a simple count of how many inquiries come in through social each month. Even an informal tally tells you a lot.

Signs your social media is working, even when growth feels slow

Organic social media takes time. If you’re three months in and not seeing a flood of new customers, that doesn’t mean it isn’t working. Here are signs you’re on the right track.

1. Your website is seeing a small but consistent stream of social traffic each month. It doesn’t need to be hundreds of visitors. Even ten to twenty sessions from social, month over month, means people are moving from your content to your site.
2. Your saves and shares are growing on educational or helpful content. If the posts that show your expertise are the ones getting saved, your audience is telling you what they value.
3. You’re getting recognized. Someone at a networking event mentions they saw your video. A new customer says they’ve been following you for a while. These offline signals are real, even when they don’t show up in a dashboard.
4. People in your target audience are following you, not just other businesses or vendors. Check who your new followers actually are. If your feed is full of competitors and bots, that’s worth addressing.

Signs something actually needs to change

Not every slow start is a patience problem. If you’ve been posting for six months or more and you have no website traffic from social, no profile visits, and no inquiries then you have a problem. At some point, consistency without results is just noise. Watch out for low intent engagement as well. If your engagement is coming entirely from other businesses, not from the people you’re trying to reach, then you are posting the wrong content. This is common when content is too industry-focused or when the platform isn’t the right fit for your audience.

Another common mistake is never defining what you’re trying to accomplish. Posting without a goal is hard to evaluate because there’s nothing to measure against. If you can’t finish the sentence “we’re using social media to ___,” that’s the first thing to fix. That also will inform your content strategy. If your content strategy changes every few weeks, the algorithm of whatever platform you use won’t be Abel to tell who to push your content to. The algorithm rewards consistency. Switching platforms, formats, or topics constantly prevents your content from building any momentum.

When to bring in help

There’s nothing wrong with managing your own social media, especially when you’re starting out. But there’s a point where the time it takes to do it well exceeds what makes sense for a business owner to handle alone.

Consider bringing in a partner if you’re posting consistently but can’t identify whether it’s doing anything for your business. Or if social media strategy is taking time away from the parts of your business only you can run. Lastly, if you want to run paid social on top of your organic content and don’t have experience with the ad platforms, you should seek out a social media specialist.

A good social media partner doesn’t just post content for you. They start with your goals, build a strategy around your audience, track the right metrics, and tell you honestly what the data shows. You should be getting a report you can actually understand, not a slide full of impressions and reach numbers with no context.

If you’re not sure where your social media stands right now, we’re happy to take a look. The social media team at TOTAL Advertising works with businesses across a range of industries and can help you figure out what’s working, what isn’t, and what to do next.

Book a free consultation with TOTAL Advertising here.

Written by

Amari Williams, Senior Search Marketing Specialist