Don’t Miss These Important Metrics in Your Next Social Media Marketing Report

Social media marketing gives brands a wide wingspan, reaching a global audience while still homing in on users who are more likely to engage with the content being shared. But scouring the analytics and sorting out meaningless metrics can be a monstrous task. Familiarizing yourself with the important metrics—the ones that actually matter to the ongoing success of your social media marketing plan—is vital to effective social media management.

Establish Goals First

The key to using analytics effectively is to pair the metrics you track with the goals you attack. Before we jump into which metrics matter most, consider the goals that are being set for your brand. For example, if you are looking to increase traffic to your website’s blog, you might track which sorts of blog posts being shared are leading to referrals (users landing on your site).

This piece of analytics management is where strong internal communication and planning come in handy. Be sure to sit down with your team and sketch out how your business goals connect to your social goals, and therefore, how your social goals connect to the metrics that you track. This will allow you a clearer picture of the plan needed to monitor how well and how often those goals are being accomplished.

Which Metrics Matter?

There are some base metrics that require attention from every brand, though some of the smaller, more specific indicators will vary based on the industry in which your brand resides. To start off, let’s look at ten important metrics to consider, no matter your niche.

Engagement

• Post interactions (Likes, comments, shares, etc.): When it comes to tracking the engagement that users are having with a specific post or with your page as a whole, it is necessary to monitor the amounts of likes, comments, shares, retweets, and so on.
• Mentions: Like above, this is another basic engagement metric that helps point to how often users are bringing your brand up in their social conversations.
• Average Engagement Rate: This is the number of engagement actions on a post (see 1a) relative to the number of followers your brand has, and it gives you a more accurate indicator toward the kind of engagement your receiving beyond just counting how many likes and comments you see.

Awareness

• Reach/Potential Reach: A post’s reach is the total number of times that people have seen the post in their feeds. Potential Reach is a related metric that can give you greater precision in identifying your brand’s true online presence. The Potential Reach displays the realistic estimate as to how many unique users could see your post based on the follower counts of users who have shared your post.
• Audience Growth Rate: Keeping track of how fast you gain followers may be even more important than tracking your total. Getting a sense of the rate at which your brand is gaining followers allows you to review what factors may be contributing to that growth—were you putting out more successful content? Did you run a strong social campaign? Identify and adjust accordingly.

ROI

• Referrals/Click-thru Rate (CTR): How often do people click on your calls-to-action? This is a critical metric because calls-to-action are often critical steps toward sourcing new customers and making sales. Measuring this will help you discover the appeal of your posts and outside content to users on social.
• Conversion Rate: Following CTR, the Conversion Rate then pinpoints how many users are taking action on whatever landing page was linked to in your calls-to-action.

Audience Voice

• Volume (e.g. keywords, tags, etc.): This is specific to certain keywords or hashtags and can help greatly in social listening for specific issues or topics. Example: If a university is having a problem with mold on campus, their PR team might be looking to see any posts from students or faculty containing the keyword “mold.”
• Share of Voice: This metric showcases your presence among your audience in relation to your competitors. It gives you an idea of how much of the virtual space your brand occupies.

Want to find other ways to improve your social media strategy? Need help building engaging content to drive conversions? Our experienced team at Kraus Marketing has the answers. Contact us today and visit our blog for more content like this.