The good thing about social media is that you can track almost every single detail through social media metrics. The tough thing about social media is that you can also track all of the negative feedback and comments. This can be overwhelming for some social media managers. To combat this, try to focus on the positive aspects of social media and use the metrics to your advantage.
The most important social media metrics are:
- Reach
- Impressions
- Engagement Rate
- Audience Growth Rate
- Referrals
- Click through Rate(CTR)
- Conversion Rate
- Cost per Click(CPC)
What are Social Media metrics?
There are a variety of social media metrics that can be used to assess the impact of social media activity on marketing campaigns and a company’s revenue. These metrics can help to assess how well you are accomplishing your goals in the social space and provide insight into where you can modify your campaign. Metrics are important for understanding how your content is performing and how much money you are earning from social media. By understanding these metrics, you can make improvements and grow your social media presence.
1. Reach
Social media reach is a media analytics metric that refers to the number of users who have come across a particular content on a social platform. Social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Spotify and many more have their own individual ways of tracking, analyzing and reporting the traffic on each of the individual platforms. Each platform allows their users to create posts and content, to be active on the platform and to interact with other users.
2. Engagement Rate
Engagement rates are often used to measure the effectiveness of brand campaigns. Individuals who spend time interacting with videos, updates, and blogs are more likely to convert into paying customers. Engagement rates also have subset measurements like sharing metrics, which highlight the impact of word-of-mouth marketing.
3. Impressions
Impressions are important because they show how many times people are seeing your content. If you have a high number of impressions compared to your reach, it means that people are looking at your content multiple times. Try to understand why your content is so popular so you can replicate that in the future.
4. Audience Growth Rate
The audience growth rate is the percentage of new followers your brand gets on social media within a certain timeframe. It’s not simply a count of your new followers, but rather a measure of your new followers in relation to your total audience. So when you’re just starting out, a small number of new followers can give you a high growth rate. But as you build up a larger existing audience, you need more new followers to maintain that momentum.
5. Referrals
Monitoring your social media referrals can help you understand which channels are most effective in driving users to your website or landing page. By targeting your high referring channels, you can increase conversions and get a higher return on investment from your social media campaigns.
6. Conversion rate
Conversion rate measures how often your social content leads to a conversion event, like a subscription, download, or sale. This is important social media marketing metric because it shows how your social content is contributing to your funnel. UTM parameters are key to making your social conversions traceable. Our blog post on using UTM parameters to track social success will explain how they work. Once you’ve added your UTMs, calculate conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the number of clicks.
7. Click through Rate (CTR)
The click-through rate (CTR) is a measure of how often people who see your content click on a link to access additional content. This could be a link to a blog post, an online store, or something else. CTR can give you a sense of how many people saw your social media content and wanted to know more about what you’re offering. It’s a good indicator of how well your social media content promotes your product or service you can calculate CTR by dividing the total number of clicks on a post by the total number of impressions for the post. To get CTR as a percentage, multiply this number by 100.
8. Cost per Click (CPC)
Cost-per-click, or CPC, is the amount you pay for each individual click on a social ad. In order to make the most informed decisions about your CPC, you need to have an understanding of the lifetime value of a customer for your business, as well as the average order value. Generally speaking, if you have a high lifetime value for your customers and a high conversion rate, you can afford to spend more per click to bring visitors to your website. However, you don’t necessarily need to calculate CPC yourself – most social networks will provide this information in their analytics.