Social media is about more than just entertainment. Social networks have evolved into excellent marketing and business tools. Tracking social media helps you keep a record of your scores and content on the web. It can help you respond quickly to what people are saying about and asking about your brand.
Social media are valuable for building relationships, communicating a message, increasing revenue, getting higher reach on your posts, generating more leads and higher sales. The only way to ensure a good result is to use the right key metrics. Tracking metrics is crucial since they’ll tell you over time whether your campaign is successful.
In this article, we look at the most important social media metrics you should start tracking.
Engagement
On social media, the engagement rate is the first area you should be interested in. It’s a metric frequently used to track how actively involved your audience is with your content and how effective your campaigns are. For this reason, engagement is an important catalyst for improvement.
Simply put, if you measure engagement, it shows how many people have liked, shared, and commented on your social media posts. A large reach with low engagement is not the best sign as it shows that your content doesn’t resonate with your target audience. Reaching millions of people means nothing if they’re not interested in what you have to offer.
But in order to increase engagement, you should first increase your following which is not an easy task. And this is where you can make use of growth tools.
For example, if you are trying to get real and engaged followers on Instagram, there are great Instagram growth tools like Kicksta or any of its alternatives that can help you achieve your goal.
Reach and Post Impressions
Reach and post impressions might be the two most important social media metrics to consider as they give an idea of the number of people that see a particular post. They share similarities in what they measure, but still, there are differences between them.
Post reach helps measure the spread of social media conversation and helps you in understanding the context for your content. On the other hand, post impression tells you how many times your target audience has seen your specific content appear on their screen.
Reach indicates how large an audience is reached by your posts, and you can set different time intervals to see how the average reach goes up and down. Keep in mind that the reach measures how many people have seen your post, not how many people have interacted with it. Reach is thus a good indicator if your content is reaching out, but it should be combined with statistics on engagement (likes, comments, shares), as well as clicks on links, to be more powerful.
Volume
Volume, which tells how many people talk about your brand, content, or campaign on social media, is perhaps the easiest social media metric to measure. It represents a great initial indicator of interest and includes counts of how many times your username has been tagged, how many times you’ve been mentioned in social media posts without being tagged, and when your brand has been used in a hashtag.
Although it might seem like a simple metric, this is a great way for you to know whether people are talking about your brand, whether your message is good and if it’s reaching your target audience.
Try to learn when the volume is higher and figure out whether there are certain days or times when people seem to talk more about your brand. This information will be beneficial to you as it tells when to post and get more engagement.
Conversion
Social media sites should get far more credit for conversions. Usually, the primary reason why businesses get on social media is to convert more people into potential customers. As a result, conversion is one metric that shouldn’t be overlooked as it sheds light on how well you are sparking interest among followers.
Monitor how much of your audience has visited your website from the social media profiles and whether it’s compelled to interact with your content. Last but not least, if you’ve posted an ad on social media, remember to track how many people have converted into customers from that specific ad.
Last Thoughts
There are numerous social media metrics available to you but we tried to compile the most relevant ones if you wish your business to grow. By paying attention to metrics like engagement, reach, volume, and conversion, over time they’ll tell if your company’s strategy is the right one and give you a view of your social media performance.
