How to Determine Which Social Media Metrics You Should Track

Social media is more than just an excellent outlet for your marketing--it can also deliver highly valuable metrics that bring you valuable insights and information. You just need to know where to look for these metrics. In this blog, we’ve compiled the social media metrics that we feel could be the most helpful to your marketing.

Of course, the particular goals you have for your marketing strategy will dictate which metrics are more valuable for you to consider. As a result, you need to establish what your marketing goals are before you can identify which metrics will be more effective to collect. Helpfully, the most common social media platforms offer you insights and metrics based on your visitors’ activity, making it much easier for you to analyze your situation and make adjustments.

What follows is our guide to which metrics you should seek out for assorted social media goals.

Goal:

Social media is all about growing the number of followers your brand has. The most important metric for almost every platform are those that allow you to establish the growth rate of your following on social media.

• Your total following shows the size of your potential audience, while you can also tell if your audience is staying with you (and not unfollowing your accounts).
• You can also calculate your growth rate, which can help you with your resource allocation.
• Your growth rate can tell you if one of your channels needs a bit more attention to reach its potential, or if your channel is expending too many resources with too little return on investment.

Facebook and Twitter both offer a metric that measures how many people have liked or followed your page, respectively, making follower growth particularly easy to track.

The real key to obtaining and nurturing a quality audience is to keep them engaged with your message. Once you’ve managed to gather a following, make sure you are investing in their engagement levels.

Goal:

The ultimate goal where engagement is concerned is to get as close to 100 percent of your social media audience to become visitors to your website, and to identify which pieces of your content are the most effective drivers to get them there.

Shared or commented on: You should establish whether or not your content is being shared or commented on, and if so, by whom. Once you have this information, you can use your audience to help spread your message, or to encourage other potential clients and customers to step forward and work with you.

Number of Views: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all also provide you with the number of views your page has gathered, giving you a baseline as to how well your content brings your audience to your profile, from which they can then navigate to your page. Facebook and Twitter also provide a count of the impressions made by your content, also known as its reach.

Knowing how many users see your content can help you establish if you are reaching an acceptable benchmark for engagement.

Goal:

By volume, we mean the amount of social media mentions your brand gets. How many people are talking about your brand, and how often do these conversations take place? These metrics should be slowly gathered over time to help identify key takeaways and patterns.

For example, times where the volume of social media mentions goes up would be good times to work on your social media engagement to nurture an audience. Twitter gives you a concise numerical value telling you exactly how many mentions you’ve earned, while Facebook can keep track of how many recommendations have been made in your favor.

These are just a few of the metrics you can track for your social media visitors. Depending on your business, your goals for your social media, or even how you approach your social media strategy, others may be more valuable for you to monitor.

In summation, the metrics you should focus on will be affected by the goals you have for your social media. We can help you determine which of your metrics are best suited for you to track. For more information, reach out to us!