Just like your ads are important to your business and you monitor them daily, the same is true for your social media profiles. The effectiveness of social media is without question crucial to your success. It’s time to decide the fate of your business and get involved so you can go toe-to-toe with your competition and keep up with your customer base.
Data gathered from social media monitoring need to show what matters. The results of your social media campaign efforts show up in the numbers and should reflect a positive impact on the business.
Social Media Metrics Defined
Depending on the level of in-depth reporting your business requires, four major categories representing each step of the customer journey contain metrics, or assessments that show specific information. Awareness is related to your brand that shows your current and potential, future audience. Engagement informs how well your audience interacts with your content. Conversions provides insight into how well your content converts, or to say it another way, how many people respond to your call-to-action in a positive way. Customer metrics reflects the value of your brand based on customer testimonials. Each of the categories within social media metrics below has its own set of metrics containing the most important ones you should closely monitor to maximize your marketing efforts.
Awareness
Brand awareness measures how much social media attention your brand receives in a specific period based on your requirements. It expresses data in likes, mentions, shares, links, or impressions. For accurate measurements over time, consistency in monitoring is key.
Audience Growth Rate
An interesting metric is learning how fast your brand’s awareness grows and the increase in the number of followers. These numbers will continue growing as Internet access becomes available to more people worldwide as they, too, get involved in social media.
Potential Reach
This is a theoretical figure representing how many people might see your post during an assigned period. When you understand your potential reach, you can now base decisions from this number.
Social Media Share of Voice (SOV)
This is a competition metric that tells you the number of people on social media mentioning your brand, either directly or indirectly, compared to your competitors. This metric helps you determine how important your brand is within the market. Analytics tools for social media streamline the process to make it easier and faster.
Engagement
The data in this crucial metric provide insight into how your readers interact with your content.
Applause Rate
As you know, when your reader appreciates the content so much, they acknowledge its value awarding a like or a favorite. This is the percentage of people responding in this way that provides the information about the value of your content and helps determine your plans for future content creation.
Average Engagement Rate
High engagement with your readers means they find your content valuable and increased likes, shares, and comments follow. This benchmark differs for each social media platform. Facebook and Twitter both have lower engagement rates in the 0.5 to 1 percent range. Instagram has a higher engagement rate of approximately 3 – 6 percent.
Boost Rate
The boost rate shows the speed at which your followers share your content, and a higher rate means they trust your brand and show a willingness to associate with your brand.
Circulation (Virality) Rate
The circulation rate shows how many people shared, not just liked, your post in relation to the total impressions the post had during an assigned time period.
Conversion
Conversion metrics show how well your social media engagement is working. The conversion rate shows the percentage of people who act relative to the number of visitors interacting with your post.
The higher the conversion rate, the more people have agreed that your content satisfies what they’re looking for such as answers to questions, or they agreed to subscribe to your newsletter, to name a few. Valuable content in social media that converts well proves it was relevant and interesting.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The Click-Through-Rate or CTR is a percentage of your readers who engage with your content or offering by clicking on a call-to-action link that takes them to other content that requires action on their part.
Remember, don’t associate CTR with likes, comments, or shares. A higher CTR means your readers find your content valuable and worthy of their attention.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate shows the percentage of your readers who click a link within your post but leave soon after arriving and do not take action of any kind. You can measure and compare the bounce rate from say a Facebook post versus traffic arriving from a Google search.
A lower bounce rate from your social media campaigns than your other sources proves your content is relevant and driving valuable traffic. One of the best tools to measure bounce rate is Google Analytics.
Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
Cost-Per-Click or CPC is the amount of money you pay for each click on your post or ad.
Pay close attention to this metric because it’s a good indicator of whether your investment is working for you, or if you’re wasting money needlessly.
If you advertise on various platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn, focus on CPC more than on your total spend because it provides a better picture of how well your money works for you.
Customer
Customer testimonials remain a strong and reliable means by which to judge a product or service. They result from happy customers and most times will gladly share their pleasurable experiences with your brand.
Social media loves meaningful and honest testimonials. They’re a testament to your brand that boost your credibility and trust. Encourage your happy customers to leave a review, but don’t offer a compensation of any kind. You want honest, from-the-heart comments and praises that you earned.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
These surveys yield results that rate your brand on a scale of 1 to 10 or Great, Good, Fair, or Poor. They’re easy to create and reveal what people think and how they feel about your brand.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The Net Promoter Score or NPS predicts customer loyalty based on the answer to only one question on a scale of one to ten. A typical question might ask the respondent if they would recommend your product or service to a friend.
For effective and timely results from your social media campaigns, always pay attention to details and learn how to interpret your findings. You can make excellent decisions based on the numbers within the metrics, so use them to your advantage. If all this information on social media metrics scares you though, there are many social media specialists out in the market today who can help you make sense of the numbers.