So, you’ve set up pages for your business on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. You’ve got plenty of super-interesting content ready to go. But how will you know if the content you’re posting is really engaging the audience you need to reach?
This is why you need to understand social media metrics. We’ve put together this guide to the data you need to show you how to measure social media success and achieve better results.
Social media metrics are categories of data that show you how your social media accounts are performing. Tracking the right social metrics will give you key performance indicators (KPIs), which you can then use to guide your social strategy going forward.
Metrics are measures of social media success. The data you receive from each of your social accounts every single time you post can tell you what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong and how much the whole thing is costing you. It can also reveal details about the audience you’re engaging, showing you exactly who you should be targeting your digital marketing at.
Put together, all of this information feeds into your social media strategy, helping you to create content designed to appeal to your target audience. It also impacts on your budget decisions, as you can see where you need to concentrate the most resources. Combined with other analytics such as UTM parameters, you can use social metrics to calculate the ROI of each social media post, giving you leverage to potentially argue for increased marketing spend in the future.
There are a wide variety of metrics you use to develop your overall picture of how well your social media marketing efforts are performing. However, there are some stats that all marketers will agree are more important than others. These are the ones that really influence all the decisions you make about your social media strategy.
The most important social metrics that you should be tracking include:
1. Reach
Reach shows you how many people are seeing your posts on social media.
For every piece of content you post, you will be able to see its reach, or how many people actually saw it. You can also see potential reach – the total amount of views your content could potentially have had. It is usually all of your own followers, plus some of the followers of those users who share your post. This is why posting shareable content is so important!
The analytics for your reach on social media will show you which individual campaigns and posts are having the best results. This can shape your social media strategy going forward.
2. Engagement
Engagement shows you how people are reacting to the content you post on social media. You need to be able to see how many people have liked, shared, saved and commented on each post so you can analyze the types of content that your audience responds to the most.
Your engagement is the total number of likes, comments and saves your post received, divided by the total reach it had.
By using the engagement metric, you can start to shape your social media strategy. You can test engagement by running a number of different ads and comparing the engagement data for each. You can also experiment with different types of content, such as video versus still images, to see how your audience reacts. This will help you consistently produce content that people respond to, creating a positive impression of your brand and helping to grow your reach.
3. Engagement rate
This differs slightly from your engagement on reach, because it is based on the Instagram followers you have at the time when you post rather than the reach your post achieves. Its purpose is the same, however – it shows you how people are engaging with a particular post and, therefore, how successful it is.
4. Impressions
Impressions are the number of times your post has been displayed, showing how visible a particular post has been.
If you want to find out which content works best on social media, you need a breakdown of how viewers are interacting with your content. If you are posting a video, you need to know how many people have actually watched it beyond the first few seconds so you can see how engaging it is. For all types of social media content, you can only judge its effectiveness if you can see how many times that particular post has been liked and shared. These metrics will also shape the type of content you produce in the future.
6. Click-through rate (CTR)
Click-through rate shows you the ratio of users who have clicked through to your website from your social media post to the total number of users who saw the post. This is extremely important when it comes to analyzing how traffic is driven to your website and how your leads and conversions are being created.
The more clicks a post receives, the more successful it is – the aim is to persuade viewers to click away from Facebook or Instagram onto your website. Once they’re on your site, it is much easier to convince them to make a purchase.
Your click-through rate is also important because it can have an effect on the cost of your paid advertising on social media. Most social platforms give more prominence to ads with higher click-through rates, so your advertising can end up costing you less per click. This obviously has a significant impact on your ROI.
7. Conversion rate
The last one of the social media metrics introduced in this post. The conversion rate of a social media post refers to the number of people who actually take further action after clicking on a link in the post, such as buying a product from your website or subscribing to your email newsletter, divided by the number of visitors or people who saw the post.
If you have a high click-through rate but a low conversion rate, this can show you that your website is not performing as well as it should, and help you to make changes.Chatbots have been proven to help with conversion rates and they can truly be a content generation tool, too.
All social media platforms have analytics tools that you can use to see how your content is performing on that particular platform. However, they don’t always show you all the social metrics you need, and the data is often complicated to read. Unfortunately, this makes some businesses give up on analytics altogether.
This is where tools like Kontentino, Hootsuite, Buffer or similar can help. Let’s look at Kontentino in more detail. The platform is designed to be user-friendly and easy to read. You can easily see your reach and engagement, as well as your click-through rates for each piece of content you post. It shows you your best performing posts, giving you a clear picture of the types of content your audience responds to best.
You can also connect an Ad Account to see exactly how much you spent on a particular post. This means you can quickly and easily calculate your ROI for each post by combining this data with other Kontentino analytics features.
In addition, Kontentino gives you overall insights about the audience you are reaching on social media, including their location, gender and age. This is particularly useful when it comes to crafting your social media content strategy, as you can create content that is designed to appeal directly to your target audience. It can also be a great tool for people running local businesses, as you need content that engages people in your own area.
All of this information is shown in an engaging and easy format, making the data easy for you to read and understand. It really is so much easier having all the metrics you need in one place!
As social media is constantly evolving, it is essential to have the right tools at your disposal to stay ahead of the game. This means having easy access at your fingertips to the data you need in a format that is easy to interpret. Your key metrics will enable you to create a social media marketing strategy that is flexible and adaptable and caters to the needs and tastes of the audience you need to reach.
