Social Media Metrics: The Ultimate Guide
You may be familiar with the power of social media marketing for growing your online business. However, many online business owners have a sound knowledge of assessing how their brands do on social media.
In this blog post, you will learn what social media metrics are and how to measure them.
What are Social Media Metrics?
Social media metrics are data that show how your brand is doing online. Social media metrics help you track the performance of the content you share on social media platforms.
These metrics, which complement website KPIs, measure all aspects of your social media strategy. For example, some indicate the number of impressions your content has made on the audience. Impressions are the number of people who interact with your posts.
Some indicators determine how many people like or share your posts on social media sites. The greater the number of likes and shares, the larger the audience that consumes your content.
Social media metrics are central to your social media strategy. With metrics, you can understand whether your social media strategy is working. You can use the feedback from these indicators to determine if there is a problem and take corrective steps. Doing this will help you avoid wasting funds on a social media marketing strategy that does not give you value for money.
The Importance of Social Media Metrics
For so many reasons, social media metrics are essential for your online business. One of those reasons is that they help you gauge whether or not you’re talking to the right audience. Social media is vast; therefore, it provides massive business marketing opportunities. However, getting the right audience determines whether a company succeeds in its social media marketing efforts. Social media metrics help business owners decide whether they are talking to the right audience on social media platforms.
Besides helping you determine whether you are conversing with the proper audience, social media metrics are essential for gauging the message. Effective marketing requires that the message resonate with the audience. You can use the metrics to evaluate whether the people who consume your content enjoy doing so.
Understanding and measuring social media metrics helps grow your business. You can use the metrics to determine the level of social proof your brand receives. When key influencers in an industry approve the content you share on social media, many other people will engage with the content as a form of conformity.
Social media metrics help business owners plan their marketing campaigns correctly. Advertising a brand on social media or any other platform costs money. You want to clearly understand the return before you spend money on marketing campaigns. Some social media metrics will tell you whether spending more money on a marketing campaign is worth it. If the return on marketing investment, or mROI, is low, stopping the campaign may be a good idea.
Social Media Metrics You Need to Track
Understanding which metrics to measure and how to go about it is crucial. Here are some of the primary social media metrics you should track.
Engagement
The engagement rate is one of the critical indicators of social media performance. Engagement means the number of times people read, comment, or share your social media posts. The higher the number of engagements, the better your marketing strategy on social media.
Measuring engagement is a complex process. Some people on social media may read or even share your comment but still not follow you. However, this may still contribute to your social sharing success. Social media analysts usually express engagement as a percentage. They calculate engagement percentage by adding the number of likes, shares, and comments for a post and dividing it by the total number of followers.
Website Traffic
Some businesses depend on website traffic for success. The owners of such businesses need to learn how to increase blog traffic from social media platforms. The higher the number of clicks from social media sites, the more successful the marketing effort is. Many social media analytics tools quickly show the number and sources of inbound traffic from social media platforms. They also provide tips on technical issues, like how to drive traffic to new blogs.
Video views
Videos are becoming immensely popular online forms of content. Companies are taking advantage of this trend by creating short, informative videos and uploading them on social media platforms.
Every social media network defines video views uniquely. For some sites, a view happens when a person watches the video for at least a few seconds. Others count a view when a person watches the entire video.
Regardless of how a social media site defines a view, figures about the number of people who watch videos are important for advertisers. You can use the numbers to decide which videos will help market the business.
Audience growth rate
The audience growth rate metric shows how you gain new followers on social media. A high rate of audience growth is suitable for online businesses. A considerable following provides you with an audience for sharing marketing content and converting it into paying clients.
Calculating the rate of growth of the audience is easy. You need to determine the number of new followers over a specific period. Divide this number by the total number of followers, then multiply it by one hundred to convert it into a percentage. The result will show the speed at which you grow your business on social media.
Conversion rate
The conversion rate measures the percentage of visitors who take vital steps toward becoming paying clients. The conversion rate is critical for showing whether your organic or paid social media campaigns are working. If the conversion rates are dismally low, it may be time to reconsider the effort.
Click through rate
The clickthrough rate indicates the willingness of people who view your content on social media to follow links and get additional information. The links may lead to your company’s website, social media platforms, or digital resources. The clickthrough rate shows how much people trust you and are willing to follow the links and get additional details about your brand.
Cost per click
CPC is useful when running paid advertisements on social media platforms. This metric shows how much you need to pay for every person who clicks on your advertisements on social media. Every social media network has specific figures for cost per click; therefore, you don’t have to calculate this metric from scratch.
Tools for Tracking Social Media Metrics
There are hundreds of tools for tracking social media metrics. While many are free, others need a subscription to access them. Your choice of a social media metrics tracking tool depends on the nature of your business and your preferences.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool that you can use to monitor social media metrics for your business. The tool collects and shows important data about web traffic to websites. You can use it to determine the percentage of traffic to your site from social media.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is another premium tool for tracking social media metrics. The tool has advanced features that allow you to listen to different social media platforms, plan posts, and evaluate the performance of campaigns.
Hootsuite
Another great tool for monitoring social media metrics is Hootsuite. You can integrate it with other tools for maximum performance. Hootsuite allows you to track more than 200 social media metrics on its dashboard.
Sendible
Sendible allows you to monitor what people say about your brand on social media platforms. Its other notable feature relates to reporting capabilities. You can customize reports in various formats, including PDFs.
How to Create a Social Media Metrics Dashboard
A social media metrics dashboard is a portal that shows all the essential indicators of your social media campaigns in one place. You do not want to waste time tracking every metric on a different platform. It saves you lots of time if you can get all the information about your social media performance in one place.
A social media metrics dashboard helps owners of online businesses achieve two goals. The first is to ensure they consistently post stuff on their social media pages. The second objective is to manage their paid or organic marketing campaigns on social media networks.
A good social media metrics dashboard is necessary to succeed in online marketing. Many business owners need help creating an excellent social media metrics dashboard. Here are a few things to consider when creating a social media metrics dashboard.
- Set your goals.
- The objectives of measuring social media activity determines what to include in the dashboard. The objectives may be to gain brand awareness or increase conversion rates. Remember, having too many or few metrics is not a good idea. Focus on the metrics that make sense to your brand.
- Connect social media pages to the dashboard.
- Start monitoring the KPIs.
- Ensure you can see the KPIs of your social media activities on the dashboard. Start monitoring them to determine whether the social media marketing efforts are successful.
- Keep the dashboard neat.
A neat and simple dashboard will help you get information about metrics quickly. You can also visit the dashboard daily, weekly, or biweekly to monitor progress.
Wrapping Up
Measuring social media metrics gives you a clear picture of the performance of marketing campaigns. Some standard metrics include engagement rate, clickthrough, and cost per click. Others are web traffic, audience growth, and video views. You can monitor the metrics by using premium or free analytics tools.
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