Learn what social media metrics you should be following to measure your success. Here’s why these metrics matter and how you can use them.
If you’re constantly posting to social media but not analyzing your results, you won’t know what’s working and where you have room for improvement. Tracking social media metrics is crucial to growing your following, increasing engagement and seeing more value from the time you put into posting and engaging with your audience.
Social media metrics are the data points that tell you how your social channels and content strategy are performing. They also compare that to your business goals to help you see what’s working well and where you have room for improvement.
Don’t just look at how many impressions a post gets though. You also want to know more about the engagement so you can understand what resonates with your audience. That way, you can provide more quality content that delights your audience.
Failing to review metrics could leave you without insights into crucial data points, which will impact your engagement. Without metrics, you will be blindly choosing your content strategy for social media, which will limit your engagement.
Analyzing your social media metrics not only impacts your content strategy for social media. It also provides indications of brand health, how you stack up to your competitors and performance benchmarks.
Social media data can inform your entire business strategy if used to its fullest. But it can also tell you how valuable your social media is to provide an ROI for your efforts. That way, you can showcase to your leadership team why you need to continue devoting time and resources to social media.
Now that you know you should be analyzing your social media data, you might be wondering what data points you should track and follow. Here’s a look at the most important information you can follow.
Ideally, you want to see your followers grow with time. Total follower count only tells you a small part of your social media data story though. As you gain more followers, you have the potential to reach more customers and prospects with your campaign.
Some people say that your audience size on social media is a vanity metric. And it can be to some extent because just because you have followers doesn’t mean they are engaging with your content and getting closer to becoming a customer. But audience size is still important to follow because it can tell you whether ads and partnerships are garnering new followers for you to potentially reach with the right content.
You should view your audience size as a health metric for your channels. If the number is constantly shrinking with minimal new followers, you are likely posting content that isn’t appropriate for your audience or that doesn’t interest them.
You want to be responsive to your customers as they ask questions or interact with you. Most customers expect you to respond within 24 hours when they reach out either in comments or direct messaging. Reply time is a crucial metric that tells you how you’re doing with customer service through social media.
Often, these metrics are only available if you use a social media tool to manage your various channels.
When reviewing your engagement metrics, comments are an important indicator for how much time your followers are spending with your content. Plus, customers might tell you things about themselves or their interests using comments, which can be a valuable data point for product development, customer service enhancements or ways to adapt your content to reach them better.
This metric tells you how many people had your post displayed to them. It doesn’t always mean that they interacted, read or viewed the post, but they had the opportunity to do so. Some social media channels refer to this as reach instead of impressions.
While this metric helps tell you what the social media algorithms think of your content because larger impressions and reach indicate that the social media platform thought your content was the right fit for your audience, it doesn’t always tell the whole story. So don’t go just off of impressions and reach.
Producing video content is time-consuming. You want to know that these videos are resonating with your audience. Looking at video views is a good place to start. Although views don’t tell you how much they engaged with the content, they do tell you whether people are finding your videos interesting enough to stay.
Plus, you’ll know how much awareness you’re gaining with your video content. When combined with other metrics, this can be a good indicator of how well your content is resonating with your target audience. Other metrics you should combine with video views include the duration that customers are watching your videos, likes and shares.
Gaining reviews on Facebook is important. This social proof tells future customers that you are trustworthy and care for your customers. While this opens you up to potentially getting negative reviews, it does also demonstrate the authenticity of your reviews. So don’t try to completely avoid honest feedback.
Be sure that you are responding to feedback on all review sites, including your social media sites.
Ensuring an ROI from social media can be complex. That’s because it is more focused on building relationships and awareness with your customers in most cases. However, you can and should still track your conversion rates.
This metric can tell you whether your ads are resulting in the actions you want. You might not be seeking purchases from your ads. Instead, metrics surrounding webinar sign ups, newsletter subscriptions and more might be more important.
A/B test your campaigns to see what messages result in the highest conversion rates and to start adapting your content to result in better conversions.
Review your website traffic to see what social media channels are providing the greatest traffic. You’ll see this under referral traffic. You can also use UTM tracking to see a more granular view down to the specific post.
Some social media channels might not focus on links and website traffic. Others you might see more traffic from. The most important thing is seeing steady traffic from the sources that generate traffic. You don’t want those metrics to drop off or it might indicate that you are doing something wrong.
You’ll need a social media tool to measure this metric. But when you’re engaging in social listening, you’ll see changes in audience sentiment that tell you how your audience views you and your products. Compare sentiment over time to see whether people are speaking more negatively or positively about you over time.
Social media chatter can feel like noise. But it isn’t always. It can offer insights into what people think of you and how well you’re doing with customer service and customer care.
Earning brand mentions is valuable. It means that someone enjoyed your content or product enough to post about it by name on their personal social media. It is an organic social media metric because it involves no prompting.
These brand mentions can be positive or negative. Sometimes, people go to social media to vent about their frustrations and displeasure with processes or interactions with your business. Monitoring brand mentions can help you ensure you are responding to these posts and solving the customer’s challenge.
Engagement metrics take many forms.
They all tell you how effective your content is at reaching your audience and interacting with them. The more engagement you earn, the more favorable you’ll be with the social media algorithms, which can earn you even more impressions and engagement.
Sometimes it is hard to tell why people liked a certain post so much. That makes it hard to replicate in your content planning. But you don’t want to ignore this metric as it could hold the key to gaining a broader audience organically and seeing greater ROI from your efforts.
Start seeing better results from your social media when you work with a team of experts. New Light Digital offers a team of social media specialists experienced with growing and engaging audiences both organically and with paid content. Schedule a consultation now to see whether we can help you grow your online presence.
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