The goal of most companies is to increase conversions or awareness through social media, to meet this goal, a company may decide to launch a campaign over a period consisting of varying ads and promotions. Social media metrics will allow you to measure how successful your campaign is and the impact you will have on the business. “Not only does having these metrics allow you to showcase the impact of your work to executives, but providing consistent social media metric reports can lead to major shifts for your social team, including budget increases and increased access to resources. And last but certainly not least, metrics keep you aware of general social profile and brand health – you don’t know the impact of your social media presence until you have the data to back it up.” The key is using your social media goals to identify the most relevant social data. That way, you can focus your analysis on exactly what you need. Three of the most important social media metrics your business should be tracking are:
- Reach
Reach measures how many users your posts are reaching. Reach is used as an indicator of how effective your content is at attracting new users. To track your reach, you would analyze the metrics, Audience Growth, and Audience Growth Rate. The audience growth rate shows percentage statistics of the growth rate of your audience over a certain period as well as your social media momentum. Rather than getting distracted by vanity metrics such as Total Followers and New followers, this metric allows you to measure marketing efforts over time.
“These reach metrics are usually easily accessible on the insights page (or tab) of your social media profile. Here’s an example of how Instagram does it:”
- Engagement
Engagement is useful in showing how many users interacted with your content. Based on this information, you can see your audience’s preference. For example, whether they engage more with text or infographics or whether they engage more with one topic over another. This information can guide you in developing future content. If your brand has a strong engagement, that indicates that the brand resonates well with its audience. However, if the engagement rate is low, then analyzing the metrics allows you to make changes accordingly.
To track your engagement, you would pay attention to the metrics, Overall Engagement, Amplification Rate, Virality Rate, and Audience Growth Rate. The overall engagement metric allows you to see how the audience is receiving your social media strategies. This metric compares your number of likes, shares, comments, and will enable you to compare your post engagements to your overall follower base. The amplification rate would represent the post shares divided by the number of engagements with the post while the virality rate would be the total number of shares divided by the total number of views/reach multiplied by 100.
- Conversion
The best way to measure if your social media strategy is effective is by measuring your conversions. The metrics, Total Conversions, and Assisted Social Conversions will allow you to monitor conversion trends overtime period. With this, you can also measure the effectiveness of specific campaigns in achieving conversions. If your conversions are high, then that could indicate that the company is going about its social media strategy correctly. However, you may observe that if there is a change in a marketing tactic, the conversions may dip. This can indicate your company may be taking the wrong approach.
Your social media efforts may not generate a conversion right away, but it may make a viewer more likely to visit your site at another time. “Assisted Social Conversions allows you to follow the customer’s journey through social channels and track their conversions over time. Comparing Assisted Social Conversions with Last Click (Direct) Conversions also identifies which social networks are better at courting your specific customers, and which ones are more suited for sealing the deal.”
There are large amounts of data available to companies through the age of social media. Your company is posting consistently and is engaged through social media, but how exactly do you know if you are utilizing your platform correctly? To effectively analyze your social media metrics, you must have social media goals in mind. If you have a goal in mind, the best thing you can do for your business is to relate it to a metric to determine the effectiveness of its performance.
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