The world of social media metrics can be confusing, with new metrics being created all the time. From follower counts to post engagement percentages, it can be tough to keep track of everything.
What are the most basic metrics that every company should be paying attention to? These are generalized across social media channels and the names of key metrics can vary from one channel to another. However, the core measurements that you’ll want to stay on top of for your KPIs, goal setting and campaign tracking are important for your business.
In this guide, we will explain what social media metrics are, why they are important, how to find them, and which ones you should be paying attention to. The specifics that you track will vary by industry, business, and campaigns. Consider these metrics to be the basics that you should use to build your approach to social media analytics.
What are social media metrics and why should you track them?
Your social media goals will help determine what metrics you need. Having metrics that are related to your goals will help you determine if your social media strategy is effective.
Say your business goal is to increase conversions. In order to increase conversions from social media, you need to look at social media metrics and set a time frame. For example, if you want to increase conversions by 25% in 3 months, you can create a campaign with ads, product tags, and influencers to help reach that goal. To measure the success of the campaign, look at the social traffic and conversion rate metric from those posts in your website analytics.
social media metrics are important for several reasons. They can show how successful a campaign is, how well your social strategy is working, and if it will have an impact on your business as a whole. Having these metrics not only allows you to show executives the impact of your work, but providing regular reports on social media metrics can result in your social team getting more resources, including a bigger budget. Additionally, metrics can help you keep track of your social profile and brand health. You won’t know the full impact of your social media presence unless you have data to back it up.
Measuring the right social media metrics
Each social media site has its own internal analytics that you can explore. For Facebook, these are located in the Insights tab. Twitter’s analytics can be found by navigating to Twitter Analytics. In order to see data for Instagram and Pinterest, you must have business accounts.
If you don’t have much money to spend and are just starting out, it can be a good idea to look at each of these native analytics resources separately.
It is advisable to find a social media analytics tool to save time on tasks like creating reports and compiling data from various networks. The time saved will exceed the cost of the tool.
No matter which method you choose, it is important to keep track of your metrics on a regular basis and see how close you are to reaching your goals.
After you have figured out what your goals are and how to collect the relevant data, it can be difficult to choose which metrics to focus on from the multitude of options.
The vast amount of social data can be daunting. A good way to make use of it is to find metrics that relate to your goals. For example, if you’re trying to increase awareness of your brand through publishing, you can track the number of impressions your content gets. If you’re trying to build a community, you can track how many people your posts engage on average.
9 Top Social Media Metrics to Track
All metrics provide insights that can help you assess how well your business is doing. The key is to know how to interpret what the metric is telling you and how it relates to your business goals. Here’s a closer look at some common metrics.
1. Engagement: Likes, Comments, Shares and Clicks
Engagement is a big umbrella category to track.
The engagement rate is often used to track how active your audience is with your content and how effective your brand campaigns are. Engaged consumers interact with brands through interactions such as “likes,” comments and social sharing.
The engagement of an audience with an account can be measured by likes, comments, and shares. The engagement metric is the sum of these smaller interactions. Some platforms have more than one metric or use different terminology, such as Retweets and Shares.
Audience engagement rates are indicative of how responsive your audience is to your content, as well as how many of your followers are considered to be “real.” Content that is interesting and engaging is more likely to result in higher engagement rates from your audience. Additionally, having a strong understanding of your brand will help you to create content that is more likely to resonate with your target audience.
At the granular level, you’ll look at different engagement metrics:
- 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.
Looking at just one engagement metric might not give you enough information to make decisions about your strategy. To get a better understanding of what levers you can pull to meet your specific goals, it’s helpful to look at a combination of metrics. For example, a post that receives a lot of likes but not comments or shares might not be bad if the intention was to present a beautiful image with a caption that doesn’t require engagement. However, if there was a call to action that encouraged comments and shares, then the lack of them could indicate that the caption wasn’t effective.
2. Impressions
Reach indicates the number of people who saw your content. Impressions can be higher than reach because the same person might look at your content more than once.
If a post has a high number of impressions compared to its reach, it means that people are looking at it multiple times. Try to figure out why it’s so popular.
3. Audience Growth Rate
Audience growth rate is a measure of how many new followers your brand gets on social media over a period of time.
The growth rate isn’t just a raw number of new followers, it’s presented as a percentage of your total audience. So when you have a small total audience, getting 10 or 100 new followers can appear as a higher growth rate than when you have a large total audience.
Having a large audience is good, but you need new followers to keep the momentum going.
To find your audience growth rate, track the number of new followers you gain on each platform over a set period of time. Then, divide that number by your total audience on each platform and multiply by 100 to get your audience growth rate as a percentage.
You can compare your company’s progress to that of your competitors by tracking their progress. This will allow you to see how your company is performing in comparison to others in your industry.
4. Amplification Rate
How often a piece of content is shared divided by the number of followers the account has.
Avinash Kaushik came up with the term “amplification” to describe how often your followers share your content with their own networks.
rundown The more your followers share your content, the more people you can reach.
To get your amplification rate, divide the number of shares a post gets by the number of followers you have. Multiply by 100 to get the rate as a percentage.
5. Virality Rate
Virality rate is a measure of how often your content is shared, expressed as a percentage of impressions. This is different from amplification rate, which measures how often your content is shared as a percentage of your followers.
Every time someone shares your content, it is seen by a new group of people, increasing the number of impressions. The virality rate is a measure of how quickly and widely your content is spreading.
To calculate virality rate, divide the number of shares by the number of impressions and multiply that number by 100.
6. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score
Data from CSAT can help you track customer satisfaction over time. It can also help you identify problems early on, so you can fix them before they cause too much damage. Customer service metrics are not solely about response times and response rates. CSAT (customer satisfaction score) is a metric that measures how happy people are with your product or service. Data from CSAT can help you track customer satisfaction over time, identify problems early on, and fix them before they cause too much damage.
One way the CSAT score is used is to measure satisfaction with social customer service.
The reason that many brands ask you to rate your experience with a customer service agent after the interaction is over is so that they can measure customer satisfaction.
What is your opinion of our customer service?
To calculate your CSAT score, first add up all the individual scores and divide by the number of responses. Then, take that number and multiply it by 100 to get the CSAT score as a percentage.
7. Share of voice: Volume and Sentiment
The metric of share of voice is often used in public relations or as part of a competitive analysis or paid advertising campaign in order to indicated how much online space your brand is taking up.
Maintaining a large share of voice is probably a goal you have that you measure by comparing over time. Companies come and go, but your brand will always be there. Unless you’re the only company in your field, you won’t always be able to have the largest share of voice, but you can keep track of how it changes over time and look at the reasons for those changes.
8. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric that measures customer loyalty and how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others.
NPS is a more reliable predictor of future customer relationships than CSAT because it is based on a single well-defined question.
Customers are asked to answer on a scale of zero to 10. Based on their response, each customer is grouped into one of three categories:
- Detractors: 0–6 score range
- Passives: 7–8 score range
- Promoters: 9–10 score range
NPS is beneficial for organizations because it not only captures customer satisfaction, but also forecasts future sales.
NPS stands for Net Promoter Score and is a way to measure customer satisfaction. To calculate NPS, you take the number of people who are promoters and subtract the number of people who are detractors.
To get your Net Promoter Score, divide the total number of respondents by the number of supporters and multiply by 100.
9. ROI: Referrals & Conversions
An important social metric that is most applicable for companies with websites or e-commerce platforms is social referral traffic and conversions. These are tied to both sales and marketing goals, and ultimately major business goals. To track these, you’ll need a publishing strategy that incorporates UTM tracking and a website traffic analytics program like Google Analytics or a built-in one if you’re on an e-commerce platform like Shopify.
The referral is how a user enters your website. In web analytics, you will see it categorized by source. “Social” is typically the source/medium that you will be monitoring, and it is further divided by network.
A social conversion is when someone visits your site through a social media channel and makes a purchase during that same visit.
The most important metrics to focus on are engagement, impressions and reach, share of voice, referrals and conversions, and response rate and time. These will give you a complete view of your social media performance. As you gain more experience and set new goals, you’ll add more specific metrics that relate more directly to your business.
how you’ve been able to show success What are the most important social media metrics for your brand and how have you been able to track them and show success over the course of your campaigns?
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