There is a lot of social media advice that encourages people to post more frequently.
More followers, more likes, more re-tweets, more click throughs, more ads.
So on and so forth.
I’ve had enough of this.
Although social media is a great thing and is an incredible opportunity for business owners, I sometimes feel like it can be overwhelming. I don’t feel like it, okay?!
I don’t want to spend all day every day managing my Twitter account. I would rather not map out a Facebook strategy and hire a part-time virtual assistant to implement it for me. I don’t want to use Pinterest for anything more than collecting vegan recipes and Harry Potter jokes.
And honestly?
I really don’t think I’m the only one.
We are all entrepreneurs who are motivated by working hard and seeing our efforts pay off.
But we’re human, too. We can’t do everything we want to.
Relaxation is important, and sometimes we need to give ourselves permission not to do things.
I’m not going to try to make you feel bad for how often you use social media.
I’m confident that you have the ability to find the most advantageous solution for you and your company. I trust that you are capable of completing the task without needing me to constantly oversee your progress.
Instead of discussing the irrelevant aspects of social media, I will talk about the metrics that actually produce results, so that when you take the time to go through your Twitter feed or plan your Facebook strategy, you get the most out of it.
Because honestly?
You work hard, so every minute you spend working should count.
Why Number of Followers & Likes Really Doesn’t Matter
If you want followers on Instagram, you can use a software to get them for you.
I commonly receive spam follows or comments from people who are hoping this will help them gain popularity, despite the fact that I don’t have a popular Instagram account.
I can be flattered that they liked three of my posts, left a “nice photo!” comment, and followed me…. or I can just ignore them, because I know a week from now the software they’re using will automatically unfollow me and this “relationship” they tried to establish with me would have been one-sided.
You can buy followers in order to increase the number of people who follow you. To get more likes on your posts, try adding a motivational quote to a stunning stock image.
Although those things may be exciting and play into our natural human urges to feel liked and be desired, they don’t contribute to our overall success or do much to increase our bottom line.
Instead of using a social media like as the only part of your funnel, you should use it as the first part of your funnel. It is not necessary to use a social media like.
The goal of a landing page is to get people interested in your brand so that they will sign up for your lead magnet and enter your sales funnel.
You can have a successful online sales funnel without using social media. Social media is not necessary for success, it is just an added bonus.
Let’s get started with the eight metrics that matter.
Not every business will be concerned with all of these metrics. Be careful and take notes only on the metrics that relate to your business.
The Best Social Media Metrics to Focus On
1. Engaged Commenters & Number of Average Comments
Aside from spam, comments are a sign that people are reading your posts and engaging with them.
I generally “like” a lot of pages that show up in my newsfeed but I never actually engage with them. I am not a paying customer for the most part because their content is good.
There are a few brands and bloggers that I follow that show up in my news feed. I answer every question they ask me. I’m generally a satisfied customer of these businesses, and I anticipate that I will continue to be in the near future. The thing is, just because someone follows your page or likes it, doesn’t mean they’re completely loyal to what you’re offering or teaching.
It’s usually not the people who passively consume your content that matter the most to your business, but rather the people who actively engage with it and leave comments.
Instead of trying to grow your number of likes or followers, try to find ways to encourage the fans you already have to be more active.
This ensures that you are using the effort you put into collecting followers effectively and optimally. Additionally, having an engaged comments section will act as a lure for other potential followers.
2. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the number of people who come to your website and then leave without viewing any other pages.
If you’re only driving traffic to a landing page with no menu, it will have a high bounce rate because people can only look at that one page.
This means that if your social media posts and ads are leading back to your site and people are bouncing, you don’t have to worry about it.
However, if you are using social media to bring people to a blog post that is evergreen and important, then you should pay attention to the metric of bounce rate.
This text is about whether or not your content is interesting enough to keep visitors on your site.
If not, they bounce.
If the answer is yes, they will click around to explore a few more pages on your site before leaving.
The goal of having a low bounce rate is to have a navigation menu present on the page being sent to social media traffic.
This metric will help you understand what topics your social media followers are most interested in, what topics they are not interested in, and which topics generate the most interest overall.
You can improve your social media strategy by catering to what your audience wants, which will in turn lead to increased loyalty and conversions.
3. Social Media Impressions
If you decided to run a paid ad campaign across your company’s key social media platforms, you would need to allocate a certain budget for the ads. It is difficult to know how many people saw your ad. It’s important to track the metric of how many users were exposed to your content on social media.
It is important to understand your social media impressions because this data can give you useful information about how much your ad spend can reach and can help you plan future paid ads so you can get the most out of your budget.
Even if you don’t plan on running paid ads, you should still look into how often your social media content is being seen. The data can show you how well your content is doing on different platforms.
It is important to note that each social media platform has different ways of measuring impressions. This means that if each person that sees a tweet is considered an impression, then Twitter would be considered as having a high rate of impressions. On Facebook, an impression is counted each time a paid ad is seen on screen. Instagram considers an impression to be each time a user views a piece of content. This could be things such as a static post, story, reel, or IGTV. There is no “impressions” measurement on TikTok, but you could consider each view as an impression.
4. Social Media Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is the number of visitors to your website that take your desired action, divided by the total number of visitors. This could mean that they downloaded your eBook, subscribed to your newsletter, or clicked on the play button for your podcast. The conversion rate is a measure of how relevant your content is to your audience.
In order to calculate the conversion rate, you must first ensure that your call-to-action link is trackable. You can create shortened URLs by using a free, online URL shortener like Bitly. After looking at your campaign results, check to see how many clicks and conversions your page has received.
After calculating your total number of conversions, divide that number by your total number of clicks. Multiply that number by your conversion rate. The conversion rate for this webpage can be calculated by taking the number of conversions and dividing it by the number of clicks. In this case, there were 200 conversions out of 750 clicks, so the conversion rate would be 26.6%. Even if traffic is high, conversion rate numbers may be low.
5. Social share of voice
How many people are talking about your brand on social channels? Let’s find out.
The social share of voice is a metric that measures how visible your brand is on social media. The numbers in the text refer to social media metrics that can help you understand the effectiveness of your social media strategy.
To calculate your social share of voice, measure the number of times your brand is mentioned across social media platforms. Your social media analytics tools can help you calculate the number of leads you’ve generated from your social media campaigns. In addition to mentions of your company, also include mentions of your competitors in your social media tracking. This can be done easily using an online tool like Sprout Social. This gives you the total industry number of mentions. Here is an example of what metrics of engagement would look like:
To calculate the social share of voice percentage for your brand, divide the number of mentions of your brand by the total number of mentions in your industry, then multiply by 100.
Let’s put this in perspective. Your brand has been mentioned 100 times in the last week, both directly and indirectly. Three competitors have 500 mentions, plus yours equals 600. This means that if there are 600 social media posts about a given topic, and your brand is mentioned 100 times, then your brand has a Social Share of Voice of 16.67%.
6. Social Media Engagement Rate
Kelly Hendrickson, Senior Manager of Social Media at HubSpot, states that engagement is a critical metric for comprehending social media performance.
I’ll help you hone your communication skills to effectively reach your target audience and boost your business or social media profile.” She emphasizes the importance of quality engagement no matter the size of your audience. She can help you improve your communication skills to more effectively reach your target audience and improve your business or social media profile. If you’re not careful, your social media marketing can become unbalanced and you’ll start to lose engagement with your audience. Keep an eye on your engagement rate to make sure you’re not moving too far in the wrong direction. Audience first.”
Engagement on social media refers to the number of interactions (likes, comments, shares, etc.) a piece of content or social media account receives in relation to its audience size. It’s not useful to have a lot of followers if they don’t regularly interact with the content you produce.
To measure the overall engagement rate of a social media account, you can use the following formula:
The engagement rate is the number of engagements divided by the number of followers, multiplied by 100.
Here’s how each major social media platform measures engagement:
- Instagram: Likes, Shares, Saves, Comments, Direct Messages
- Facebook: Click-throughs, Comments, Reactions, Shares
- TikTok: Likes, Comments, Shares
- Twitter: Likes, Comments, Retweets
- Pinterest: Pins, Likes, Comments
- LinkedIn: Reactions, Comments, Shares, Click-throughs
- YouTube: Likes and Dislikes, Comments, Shares
7. Customer response rate
Customers love to engage with brands via social media.
Sprout Social poll indicates that majority of users follow and engage with brands on social media. Make sure you’re answering questions and reviews left by customers on social media. To see how you’re doing with this, check your customer response rate.
To calculate your customer response rate, divide the number of people who engaged with your brand by the number of responses you give to your followers/customers and multiply this by 100.
The customer response rate would be 50% if, for example, the number of customers who engaged with the brand was measured over a week, and 50 responded, with the brand responding to half of those.
8. ROI data
This is the most important metric, the one you want to see from the beginning. The ROI for your company and industry can vary greatly. The primary goal of social media should be to generate leads, increase conversions, or create brand awareness.
According to a group of 1,000 marketers surveyed by the HubSpot Blog, the following social media platforms generated the biggest ROI for paid advertising campaigns:
- Facebook (26%)
- Instagram (19%)
- YouTube (18%)
- Twitter (13%)
- TikTok (11%)
In that same survey, marketers said the following metrics were their primary markers of measuring social media ROI in 2022:
- Traffic to Their Website (35%)
- Impressions/Views (31%)
- Clicks (31%)
- Sales (30%)
- Likes/Comments (28%)
varies from one business to another, and is calculated based on your business goals, rather than using a standard formula. This formula can be used to calculate a basic ROI. That would give you a 3x return on ad spend. If you made 1500 dollars in revenue from social media ads or eCommerce and your investment was 500 dollars, you would have a 3x return on ad spend. Your return on investment (ROI) is the amount of profit you make from an investment, minus the investment itself. In this case, you would subtract the investment of $500 from the revenue of $1,500, which would give you a profit of $1,000 and an ROI of 200%.
Tracking metrics can sometimes be easy. Investing in social media tracking tools can help businesses run more smoothly.
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