By Katie Mientka
Knowing that social media is critical to your overall marketing strategy is one thing; proving that it yields the results your company needs is a different beast. Whether you are making decisions about where to direct resources or justifying a budget to your bosses, you need hard data. By tracking the right social media metrics, that’s just what you will get.
Are You Measuring….
Brand Awareness.
This is a basic at-the-start social media metric that helps you analyze whether or not you are breaking through the noise. Do people, particularly your target audience, know who you are?
One way to measure this is by seeing how much attention your brand gets in terms of mentions, shares, links, and/or impressions. A brand monitoring tool, such as Social Mention or Hubspot Social Inbox, can help you get this information. Track it over a specified period (week, month, quarter) and use that as a starting point for comparison as you proceed.
You can also look at audience growth rate, which looks at how fast you are building a following. To do this, measure your new followers over a specified period. Divide this by the total audience and multiply by 100 for your audience growth rate. For example: you get 50 new followers in a month and have 5000 overall. Your growth rate is 1%. Do this for each platform.
Reach.
Your social media marketing partner or a monitoring tool can help you track reach. This is the number of people who see a post once you’ve pushed it live. Reach is not synonymous with followers; of 1000 fans, for example, you may only be reaching a few hundred. With this knowledge, you can take proactive steps to increase your reach, such as delivering more targeted authoritative content, posting at optimal times of day and days of week, and interacting with your social community.
Engagement Rates.
While reach refers to how many people see your posts, engagement tracks how many interacted with it in some way. It could be likes or reactions (e.g. love or wow on Facebook), comments, or shares. You can get an average engagement rate by adding up all of a post’s likes, comments, and shares, dividing by your total number of followers, and multiplying by 100.
For example, if a post generated 100 likes, comments and shares and you have 500 followers, your average engagement rate is 20%.
It may be helpful to separate out these numbers by goals. If your primary goal is to increase your reach, look specifically at shares. If you want to generate conversation and interaction, likes and comments is the social media metric to look at.
Share of Voice.
How many people are talking about you versus the competition? To figure it out, measure every one of your brand mentions across all social platforms for a given period. Do the same for your competitors. Add all of these mentions up. This gives you total industry mentions.
Say – purely for easy math – that your brand received 100 mentions, Brand X 75, and Brand Y 110. This is 285 mentions total. Divide your brand mentions by this total and multiply by 100. 100 ÷ 285 = 0.35 x 100 = 35%. This is your share of the social conversation. Now you can take steps to boost it.
Click-Through Rate.
This social media metric refers to the frequency with which people click on a call to action in your post. (Read More! Sign Up for Our Newsletter, etc.) Divide the number of clicks on a post’s link by the total number of impressions (how many times it was viewed) for that post. Multiply by 100 for your CTR.
Conversion Rate.
How many people take action after clicking through to a landing page? You can install cookies to track how many users click the CTA link and convert. Divide the conversions by total clicks and multiply by 100 to get your percentage.
This will tell you if the content you are providing is of value to your target audience – and if you are getting your message to them. If you have a low conversion rate, rethink the content you provide, the timing and frequency you post, and your CTA wording itself.
It can be easy to get overwhelmed with data; you can measure and track virtually everything. The key is to select the social media metrics that align with your brand’s specific goals. The ones mentioned above offer a great starting point. If you’re looking for more guidance to overcome the frustrations of measuring and managing your metrics, start by taking our quiz to find out if your current strategy is effective.
