The social media metrics that count

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Maintaining social media channels is a key part of your marketing strategy because it shows you’re up to speed and helps to increase brand awareness and loyalty.

It’s also becoming the most relevant way to interact with customers, as 45% of consumers reported social media is one of the first channels they go to in case they have questions or issues (Sprout Social).

But the most important aspect when it comes to your social media strategy is using analytics to understand how your marketing campaigns are performing on social media.

By measuring social interactions, you can see what’s working and whether you need to tweak your strategy to be more impactful.

So, what should brands be measuring?

The need-to-know metrics

Every social media platform has analytics you can view but to maximise efficiency and gain useful overview data, it’s worth considering a social media analytics tool such as HubSpot or Sprout Social that can pull metrics from different sources and automatically create reports.

The most important metrics can depend on your business goals, but generally you should aim to measure the following.

Engagement

This is an overarching metric for small engagement metrics such as likes, comments and shares that demonstrate how audiences are interacting with your account and posts.

You should look at:

Likes, Comments, Retweets, etc.: Individual engagement metrics like a Share or a Retweet add up. In a Twitter report, you’ll see a total number of engagements per post or profile.
Post engagement rate: The number of engagements divided by impressions or reach. A high rate means the people who see the post find it interesting.
Account mentions: Organic mentions, like @mentions that aren’t part of a reply, or tagging a brand in an Instagram story without prompting, indicate good brand awareness.

Awareness

Awareness in the form of impressions and reach are both valuable metrics, especially if your goals are focused on increasing brand awareness.

To determine whether you’re achieving awareness goals, look at:

• Impressions: How many times a post shows up in someone’s timeline
• Reach: The potential unique viewers a post could have (usually your follower count plus accounts that shared the post’s follower counts).
• Share of voice

This metric looks at the conversation about your brand compared to your competitors and is often used in public relations or competitive analysis.

If you find your brand is being talked about less than competitors, you should ramp up your social activity to cut through industry noise and create share-worthy content to get people talking.

Referrals and conversion

Acquisition data shows what kind of traffic you’re getting from social media channels to your website and how it performs on the site. If a social media channel isn’t attracting the number of click-throughs you want, use the data to improve calls to action and campaigns.

Conversion rate is the number of visitors who take action on a site page after clicking a post link(e.g., subscribe to your newsletter, download a gated content asset, register for a webinar) against that page’s total visitors.

If your analytics show a high conversion rate, it means your content is valuable to the target audience.

Customer care

While post and account performance is important, customer experience shouldn’t be forgotten about.

As people increasingly use social media to ask questions and raise issues with brands, it’s useful to focus on metrics such as response rate and time to ensure customers are being dealt with properly.

Using social analytics means you can see which tactics are working, help you to better allocate your time spent on different channels, and achieve ROI from social media.

If you would like to find out more about social media analytics, email [email protected] or call 01926 422002 to chat with a member of our content team.