What Are the Most Important Social Media Metrics to Focus On?

No business can afford not to use social media marketing these days but measuring your social media metrics is vitally important to check that you’re getting the most out of your marketing strategy and to see whether or not you’re using the correct networks for your sector.  However, with so many different metrics available to use – no one wants to waste time analysing the wrong set of data.  So, which are the right social media metrics for you to keep an eye on?

We’ve created a list of the best social media metrics that give you the numbers you need to help you grow your social media presence. The metrics below give you customer insights, return on investment insights, and information on how to improve your online presence using social media. Apply these social media metrics to your social media strategy for 2022. They’ll help you to see which social media networking platform works for you, how your audience perceives you, and even shape your future marketing strategy. For more on how to promote your content on Instagram, we suggest checking this link after you’ve read this piece: https://www.reliablecounter.com/blog/need-some-ideas-for-instagram-promotion-look-no-further-than-this-guide/.

Let’s go!

The Social Media Metrics To Keep an Eye On

We will go through the following list of social media metrics:

• Your social media channels
• Your audience growth
• Your impressions
• Your conversions
• Your voice recognition
• Your keywords
• Your response
• Your return on investment
• Your use of influencers
• Your web traffic
• Your audience insights

Now we’ll delve into each metric, so you understand what each one means.

Your Social Media Channels

You need to split all of the above down into each social media channel to find out the biggest performing network. Then you can work out which works best for you, which doesn’t perform as well and where you need to focus your time. You might even decide to deactivate a social media platform in favor for better-performing networks or you might decide to pay for likes on Instagram or buy views for Instagram. Alternatively, you might decide to try something brand new.

Audience Growth

This relates to measuring how your audience grows. You can do this by choosing a reporting period and see what followers you gained and how many you lost. Then, you simply divide your new followers by your total followers to get the answer.

Your Impressions

If you decide to conduct a paid advertising campaign across all of your social media platforms, this is the measurement of people who saw your ad. This type of data will help you determine your future ad spend and plan your advertising budget going forwards. Your impressions doesn’t just relate to your advertising spend either, your impressions relate to how your audience responds to the content that you post on your social media platforms. Each social media platform measures its impressions differently. As an example, let’s take Twitter. Every time a user views a Tweet, Twitter measures that as an impression. On Facebook, every time a paid advert appears on a user’s screen, that is an impression. Each time an Instagram user views a piece of content, whether it’s a Reel, Story, IGTV or image, it’s an impression. Interestingly, TikTok doesn’t measure impressions.

Your Conversions

This social media metric relates to how many social media users who visit your website and take action. The action could be to sign up for a newsletter, download an e-book, read a blog, or buy a product. To calculate your conversion rates your call-to-action link (download now, sign up here, buy now) needs to be trackable. You should connect it to Bitly and analyze your campaign to see how many people clicked and converted. Once you’ve done that, divide your conversions by your clicks for your figure and then multiply it by your conversion rate.

Sharing Your Voice

How many people are talking about your brand or business on social networks? This social media metric relates to who’s sharing your voice and how visible your brand is. To work it out, you need to research your mentions across all of your networks. We’d recommend using each social media platform’s analytical tools to generate a number. Then add your mentions and track the mentions of your direct competitors. You’ll work out the total industry mentions, and you compare your own to that number to see how well you rank. Divide your brand mentions by the total industry mentions and multiply this figure by 100, this gives you your share in percentage terms.

Your Engagement

Your engagement relates to how your audience engages with your content on social media. It’s the number of shares, comments, interactions and likes you get for each piece of content that you post. If you have a large following but your audience doesn’t interact with your content, then there’s not that much value in your account. You might want to buy real Instagram followers to boost your engagement. To work out your engagement on a specific social media account, the formula is the number of engagements divided by your followers and then multiplied by 100. It’s also worth knowing that each social media platform has a different way of measuring engagement as follows:

• Instagram uses likes, saves, shares, comments, and DMs.
• Facebook uses click-through, reactions, shares, and comments.
• TikTok uses shares, comments, and likes.
• Twitter uses likes, comments, and retweets.
• Pinterest uses pins, comments, and likes.
• LinkedIn uses reactions, comments, click-throughs, and shares.
• YouTube uses likes, dislikes, shares, and comments.

Your Keywords

Keywords are essential for websites and social media. They’re what frame what you do, and they are searchable terms that your audience use to find your product, service, or content. They are very important for growing an audience. As an example, if you sell men’s trainers, one of your keywords will be men’s trainers, or perhaps you might put in men’s running shoes or men’s workout trainers or men’s fashion trainers. Those are all searchable terms, and you could even add a brand such as men’s Nike running shoes. Those are keywords, essentially short phrases that are searchable terms on search engines and social media. You use your keywords to track your searchability and rank higher on search engines. Track and find your keywords by using https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/.

Your Response

This relates to how your customers engage with your brand using social media and how you respond. There’s an enormous opportunity here especially as 75% of people engage with the businesses and brands, they follow on social media. Your customers’ response could be asking a question, leaving a review, or sending you a DM. It is very important that you reply because if you don’t, your customer could go elsewhere. To work out your response rate, divide the number of replies by the number of people who engaged with your brand. Next, multiply the number by 100.

Return on Investment

This is the most important metric as you’ll want to know what your return on investment is. If you take your social media, it’s the amount of investment you’ve made on each platform (and in its entirety) and how many sales its generated. We can tell you that the following social media networks generate the biggest return on investment for ad campaigns:

• Facebook 25%
• Instagram 20%
• YouTube 20%
• Twitter 15%
• TikTok 10%

To measure your return on investment, you need to work out your web traffic, views, clicks, sales, and likes or comments. Every business has a different return on investment requirement so calculating this will be different for each. Work out your spending versus how many people used your campaigns to click through and make a sale or book a service. Subtract your revenue from your investment to work out your profit.

Your Influencer Use

If you use an Influencer or Influencers to boost your social media presence, then you need to know if it has worked for you – and if you want to go forwards with Influencer marketing in the future. You’ll need to measure your sales, how the campaign improved your brand awareness, your impressions, your mentions, and your clicks.

Your Web Traffic

This is one of the biggest metrics and really, it’s where you want your customers to be, on your website buying! Measure your page views that come directly from your social media networks and to do this, visit Google Analytics to see where your traffic comes from.

Your Audience

How well do you know your audience? It’s really important that you understand your followers and that you target your audience by sharing the right type of content that they resonate with. Think about your demographics. At the very basic, you need to consider age, location, gender, education, job title, marital status, and more. Your social media platforms should be able to give you all that information. Additionally, it helps to develop a buying persona, so create the ideal buyer and give them a name, gender, age, where they live, what they like, what they don’t like, how they socialize etc. This will help you to work out your audience.

The Best Tools for Tracking Your Social Media Metrics

There are some useful online tools to help you track your social media and we’ll go through three, Keyhole, Meltwater, and Netbase.

Keyhole

This costs $179 a month and it’s a useful all-in-one social media metric tracking tool that will show you your impressions, reach engagements, and posts that get the most views. You’ll also get to know your demographics. All information is pictured on a dashboard so it’s very easy to view. Download Keyhole here

Meltwater

This social media metrics app tracks your accounts in real-time and there’s a very easy-to-view dashboard. You will also see all of your insights and user-generated content together and when something’s trending well for you. This app scours the web to find where your brand or business is mentioned and gives you a useful list of industry-related Influencers that you might want to work with. Get Meltwater here.

Netbase

This social media metrics tool costs from $300 to $1,000 a month depending on the package you want and give you access to global insights and tracking detail. You’ll also get to understand the conversations around your brand – across the globe and the app gives you real-time analytics. Using Netbase, you can see just how well each of your marketing campaigns perform on social media. Get Netbase here.

Final Words on Social Media Metrics

We hope the above information helps you with deciding what social media metrics you want to use to track insights for your business. By using some of the web tools we’ve added, you can get everything you need in one place. Do run regular reports (at least once a week) to see how well your marketing has performed and remember to compare week on week and year on year, taking into account when you run specific holiday promotions, discount codes, coupons, competitions, and advertising campaigns. For more on advertising and what it really means, check this post out: https://www.oflox.com/blog/what-is-advertising/.