Social Media Metrics Your Business Should Track
When you’re running a small business it can be quite easy to think that you just need to set up a Facebook or Twitter account and that’s enough to keep your customers happy but you need to keep track of certain things to understand whether these platforms are working for you. In this article David Webb takes a look at what metrics you need to keep an eye on and why.
The number of social media users is expected to jump to 3.02 billion by 2021. Therefore, using these channels to promote your business should be your paramount.
However, in the highly competitive social media marketing landscape, just having a Facebook or Instagram account is not enough. You need to constantly improve your online presence and, to do so, you first need to know what tactics work or don’t work for you.
Unfortunately, the majority of small businesses still don’t understand the importance of tracking their social media performance. The 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report highlights that 87% of marketers are not sure what their strongest social media tactics are.
If you’re one of them, it’s time to rethink your approach to social media marketing. Not tracking the right metrics prevents you from resolving problems faster and focusing on the practices that bring you better results.
Here are a few metrics you should track to boost your social media marketing strategy.
Measure how Strong your Brand Is on Social Networks
Social networks give you an amazing opportunity to build personal relationships with your target audience and increase their awareness of your brand. Precisely because of that, measuring your brand awareness should be your priority.
Your goal is to track brand awareness metrics such as shares or brand mentions during the reporting period. You can use social mention monitoring tools that will track both direct and indirect brand mentions for you. These tools will let you know when someone mentions your brand on social networks, letting you track users’ discussions and collect their feedback in real-time.
Calculate Users’ Engagement with your Content
Just because your follower base is growing fast doesn’t mean your social media marketing efforts really work. If your followers aren’t interested in the content you share, this means that you’ve either targeted the wrong people or that your content doesn’t resonate with them.
This is why you need to measure engagement metrics. Now, when tracking user engagement, you need to separate vanity metrics from ones that really indicate the effectiveness of your campaigns. Here is how.
- Instead of Likes, Measure the Applause Rate.
Just like their name says, social media likes tell you how many people liked the content you shared. Still, just observing the likes your individual posts receive means nothing, as these numbers vary.
Now, to get the most of your likes, you need to measure the applause rate that tells you how many of your followers like your posts. Therefore, to measure it, you need to the divide your likes per post by the number of followers.
- Instead of Shares, Measure the Amplification Rate.
Similarly to your likes, social shares don’t tell you much about users’ engagement. Instead of them, start measuring the amplification rate that shows you the average number of shares you get. Therefore, when measuring it, you need to divide the number of shares per post by the total number of your followers.
- Measure your Virality Rate.
Simply put, virality rate puts your content shares in a wider context. It tells you how many people shared your post, as opposed to the number of people who viewed it. This is exactly how you calculate it- you divide the number of post shares by the number of impressions.
Pro tip: To convert your applause rate, amplification rate, or virality rate into percentages, simply multiply the number you get by 100.
Track your Click-Through Rates Parallel with the Bounce Rate
The click-through rate (CTR) is one of the most significant social media metrics. It tells you how many people land on your site from your social networks. The way you calculate is rather simple. You need to divide the number of clicks your post gets by the number of impressions and multiply this digit by 100 to see your CTR in percentages.
Now, we come to the core of the problem. Just driving people to your site is not enough. Your goal is to engage those people and inspire them to stay longer on your site. If they spend, let’s say, 5 minutes on your page, reading your content and interacting with it, they like it. However, if they leave your site right after landing on it, it’s obvious something went wrong.
This is why you need to measure your bounce rates, as well. The bounce rate shows you how many visitors landed on your site by clicking on your social media link and left after viewing only one page. You can measure it using Google Analytics. Choose the “Bounce Rate” section under “All Traffic” and Google Analytics will rank the online marketing channels you use by the bounce rate.
Even though high bounce rates may be a result of poor website optimization or unsatisfactory user experience, they may also be related to the relevance of your social media content. If Google Analytics shows you that the visitors coming from social networks bounce more than those coming from other digital marketing sources, this means you need to change your social media tactics.
Stay on Top of your Conversion Rate
Conversions are a key element of your social media strategy. They are the main reason why you’re even using social networks. Simply put, once a user lands on your site and engages with your content, your goal is to convert them into a paying customer.
You can do this by “funnelling” them through a series of steps whether that’s something as simple as filling in a form, to more complicated such as signing up for an email series then purchasing a course, these funnels can take various forms. You may want to use a form funnel or landing page from companies like such as Clickfunnels or Leadpages but whatever method you choose you need to ensure you’re getting some data that you can use so you know the campaign is working.
Now, it’s important to measure how many conversions each digital marketing channel brings to you. The social media conversion rate tells you the total number of conversions you get from social networks. Obviously, it’s calculated by dividing social media conversions by the total sum of conversions. To express the figure in percentages, multiply it by 100.
Back to You
To get the most of your social media marketing strategy, you need to measure it continually.
Prioritize audience metrics that will tell you how strong your brand is on social networks. Based on the feedback you collect, you will be able to create better-targeted content and tailor your social media practices to your followers’ needs.
Keep a close eye on engagement metrics to see how well your tactics resonate with your target audience.
Compare your CTR with the bounce rate to get better insights into your users’ satisfaction.
Calculate the conversion rate. Remember, there is no point in growing your online community if your followers are not ready to convert.
Finally, keep in mind that choosing social media metrics depends on the goals you set. Always choose the metrics that can clearly show you how effective and profitable your SMM strategies are.
How does the choice of the right metrics impact your social media strategy? We’d like to hear from you in the comments!
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