If you’re constantly posting on social media but not analyzing the results, you won’t be able to understand what’s working and what could be improved. Tracking social media metrics is critical to growing your following, increasing engagement, and getting more value out of the time you spend posting and interacting with your audience.
What are social media metrics?
Social media metrics are data that show how effective your social channels and content strategy are. They also compare them to your business goals to help you see what’s working well and where there’s room for improvement.
But don’t just focus on how many impressions a post gets. You also want to know more about engagement to understand what resonates with your audience. That way, you can deliver better content that will delight your audience.
If you don’t analyze metrics, you won’t be able to understand the most important things that will impact engagement. Without metrics, you’ll be blindly choosing your social media content strategy, which will limit engagement.
Why Measuring Social Media Metrics Matters
Analyzing social media metrics not only influences your social media content strategy, it also provides insight into your brand health, how you stack up against your competitors, and performance benchmarks.
Social media data can be the foundation of your entire business strategy if you use it to its full potential. But it can also tell you how valuable your social media is to ensure your efforts are paying off. That way, you can prove to your management why it’s important to continue devoting time and resources to social media.
The most important data about social networks
Now that you know you should be analyzing social media data, you may be wondering what data points you should be tracking and monitoring. Here’s an overview of the most important information you can track.
Audience
Ideally, you want to see your follower count grow over time. Your total follower count is only a small part of your social media data story. As your follower job function email list count increases, you have the opportunity to reach more customers and potential buyers with your campaign.
Some people say that your social media audience size is a vanity metric. To some extent, this is true because just because you have followers doesn’t mean they’re engaging with your content and are any closer to becoming customers. However, it’s still important to monitor your audience size because it can tell you whether your ads and partnerships are generating new followers that you could potentially attract with the right content.
You should consider your audience size as an indicator of the health of your channels. If your audience size is constantly decreasing and your number of new subscribers is minimal, then you are likely posting content that is not relevant to your audience or does not interest them.
Response time
You want to be responsive to your customers when they china business directory ask questions or interact with you. Most customers expect a response within 24 hours when they reach out to you via comments or direct messages. Response time is a critical metric that shows how you are engaging with customers on social media.
Often these metrics are only available if you use a social media tool to manage your different channels.
Comments
When analyzing engagement metrics, comments are an important indicator of how much time your followers spend with your content. Additionally, comments are a great way for customers to tell you about themselves or their interests, which can be valuable information for developing a product, improving customer service, or tailoring your content to better engage with them.
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Impressions
This metric shows how many people your post was shown to. It doesn’t always mean they interacted with, read, or viewed the post, but they had the opportunity to do so. Some social media channels call this metric “reach” rather than “impressions.”
While this metric helps you understand what social media algorithms think of your content, since higher impressions and reach indicate that the social media platform thinks your content is relevant to your audience, it doesn’t always tell the whole story. So don’t rely solely on impressions and reach.
Video views
Producing video content takes a lot of time. You want to know that these videos are resonating with your audience. A good place to start is by looking at your video views. While views don’t tell you how engaged they are with the content, they do tell you whether people find your videos interesting enough to stick around.
Additionally, you will learn how widely your video content is being viewed. When combined with other metrics, this can be a good indicator of how well your content is resonating with your target audience. Other metrics to combine with video views include how long customers watch the video, likes, and shares.
Reviews
Getting reviews on Facebook is very important. how to use sms and sns This social proof tells future customers that you are trustworthy and care about your customers. While this can potentially get you some negative reviews, it also demonstrates the authenticity of your reviews. So don’t try to avoid honest reviews entirely.
Make sure you respond to reviews on all sites, including your social media.
Conversion rate
Ensuring ROI on social media can be challenging. This is because in most cases, it is more focused on building relationships and awareness with your customers. However, you can and should track your conversion rate.
This metric can tell you whether your ads are driving the right actions. You may not be looking to make purchases through your ads. Instead, metrics around webinar registrations, newsletter signups, etc. may be more important.
A/B test your campaigns to see which messages drive the highest conversion rates and start tailoring your content to drive better conversions.
Referral Sites Traffic
Analyze your website traffic to see which social media channels are driving the most traffic. You’ll see this in the Referral Traffic section. You can also use UTM tracking to see a more detailed picture down to a specific post.
Some social media channels may not focus on links and website traffic. In others, you may see more traffic. The most important thing is to see consistent traffic from sources that generate traffic. You don’t want these numbers to drop, or it could indicate that you’re doing something wrong.
Audience Mood
You’ll need a social media tool to measure this metric. But if you’re doing social listening, you’ll see changes in audience sentiment that will tell you how your audience feels about you and your products. Compare sentiment over time to see if people are becoming more negative or positive about you over time.
Social media chatter can seem like noise. But it doesn’t always have to be. It can give you insight into what people think of you and how well you’re doing at serving and caring for your customers.
Brand mentions
Earning brand mentions is very valuable. It means that someone liked your content or product enough to post about it on their personal social media. This is an organic social media metric because it requires no effort.
These brand mentions can be both positive and negative. Sometimes people will post on social media about their frustrations and dissatisfaction with your business’s processes or interactions. Monitoring brand mentions will help you ensure that you are responding to these messages and addressing the customer’s concerns.
Engagement metrics
Engagement metrics take different forms.
- Like
- Comments
- Retweets
- Reactions
- Stock
- End of video
They all tell you how effectively your content reaches and engages with your audience. The more engagement you have, the more favorably you are viewed by social media algorithms, which can lead to even more impressions and engagement.
Sometimes it’s hard to understand why people liked a particular post so much. This makes content planning difficult. But you shouldn’t ignore this metric, as it can be the key to reaching a wide audience organically and increasing the ROI of your efforts.
Help with tracking social media engagement
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 in reaching audiences, both organic and through paid content. Schedule a consultation today to see if we can help you grow your online presence.