Social media is an essential marketing tool. Tracking the correct social media metrics around your competition, products, company, and industry gives you important insights into your company’s impact in your industry, your positioning, and how effective your strategies and tactics are. Anyone wondering how to measure social media success can use this quick guide to discover which metrics to track, how to measure them, and how you can use them to make your campaigns even more successful.
Defining Social Media Metrics
You set social media goals for your business, and each goal requires a measurable metric. This metric will tell you whether or not your social strategy works. For example, you want to boost your conversion rate. The goal for social media is to increase conversions from users who find you on social media platforms and follow through to your website. With this goal in mind, you can identify which social metric you want to measure in a set time frame.
The goal could be to increase your conversions by 20% in 90 days. To achieve this, you run a campaign that includes influencers, product tags, and ads. You’ll look at your conversion rate metric and social traffic from those campaign posts using your website analytics to decide if your strategy worked or failed. Depending on the results, you’ll set up another campaign with a different social metric to measure your success or failure until you get the results you want.
Social Media Metrics to Track Social Media Success
Since there are dozens of social metrics you could experiment with, let’s focus on the most important ones so you can start your tracking in the most impactful categories.
Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is the number of visitors that come to your website and perform your desired action like downloading an eBook or signing up for your weekly newsletter. This social metric shows you how relevant your audience finds your content.
Measuring Conversion Rate
- You’ll need a trackable call to action to calculate this rate, and you’ll run a short campaign before analyzing how many conversions you got on your page. Once you get this number, divide your total conversions by the number of total clicks. So, if your website got 900 clicks and 450 conversions, your conversion rate would be 50%.
CTR (Click-Through-Rate)
The CTR social media measure tracks how many users click on your content or ad that usually leads them to a page on your site where they take action. If you have social media ads up, they should lead anyone who clicks on them to your landing pages, encouraging them to complete the conversion process.
Measuring CTR
- CTR is the number of clicks you get divided by the number of impressions. You take this number and multiply it by 100. Every large social media platform will automatically calculate the CTR on your ads for you. All you have to do is click on “Ads” before going to the “Performance and Clicks” portion.
Engagement and Engagement Rate
Your engagement social metrics tell you how often and how frequently other people interact with your content and your company on any platform. Someone commenting, liking, or favouriting your content means they’re actively engaging with you.
The engagement rate represents when people work to amplify your content by sharing it through a retweet, reblog, share, repin, etc. It’s an important metric because it indicates how well your content resonates with your audience. To get the engagement rate, take the number of engagement actions and see how it totals out to your follower count.
Measuring Engagement and Engagement Rate
- Every social network platform gives you engagement touchpoints, which means each one measures them differently. Twitter has replies and retweets, Facebook has likes, shares, and comments, while Instagram offers likes and comments.
Reach or Exposure and Impressions
The potential audience that could see any messages or posts you put out based on your follower count is your reach. Say your Facebook page for your business has 2,000 followers. You could potentially reach 2,000 people with each post.
Exposure goes a step further and measures both the number of followers and how many followers every follower has. Every time someone shares one of your posts, their followers can view it. This is an impression. For example, if one of your followers had 12,000 followers, and they reposted or retweeted one of your messages, the exposure count would include your audience’s impressions plus the 12,000 impressions your follower has.
Measuring Reach or Exposure and Impressions
- To measure your reach, simply count the number of followers you have across all social media platforms. Each platform has analytics tools you can use to keep track, but you can also tally up the follower count manually after every post.
Share of voice will give you a good understanding of your social media success, showing how well your company or brand is doing compared to your direct competition. It’ll show you your mention percentage inside your niche industry, and it’ll also give you your competitor’s mention percentage. The audience growth rate will measure how your company or brand’s following across the social media platforms changes. It’s easy enough to track each platform individually to get a solid number.
Measuring Share of Voice and Audience Growth Rate
- Set up a specific timespan and add up all of your brand’s mentions. Get the mention numbers for your competition during the same time. Divide your brand’s mentions by the total competition’s mentions to get your share of voice. For audience growth rate, track any changes to your audience number over a set time. This will give you the average decrease and increase for this metric.
Video Views as the Indicator of Your Social Media Success
This metric tracks how many people view your videos and the time they spend watching them. You can use this metric to see how well your videos connect with your audience and if you need to shorten them or go in another direction.
Measuring Video Views
- You can use engagement metrics to find the video percentage that people watch and the average view time. To get the average view time, take each video’s total watch time and divide it by the total number of video views, including replays.
Use Kontentino to Understand How to Measure Social Media Success
Kontentino allows users to plan, approve, and schedule social media content across various platforms. There are analytics tools for each platform to show how each piece of content connects to your targeted audiences, and you can use it to see if you need to adjust your current strategy or try something different. The push notifications ensure that you don’t miss a post, and the social media metrics tracking tools give you everything you need to measure how successful you are.
You can sign up for Kontentino and try it for free for 30 days to see your social media measurements, refine your strategy, and improve your marketing campaigns.
