What are social media marketing metrics? Social media marketing metrics are the number of social media users, the growth of subscribers, etc. It shows that how successful your strategy works and what kind of changes you need in your strategy. There are several key metrics for your social media marketing but there are not the same for every company. It depends on the supporters, competition, and so on. Sometimes it is hard to define/measure success because every business has its own significance for each metric.
Social media followers
Many marketers dismiss this as purely a vanity metric. How many followers you have isn’t as important as how engaged your followers are.
That may be true. But if your goals include extending your network and increasing your reach, your follower count plays a role. Especially if you’re marketing across several social media channels:
If one of these profiles is new, it makes sense that you don’t have many followers yet. But what if you’ve worked to build audiences on Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn for the past six months?
You may discover quickly that your YouTube profile is far more popular than your LinkedIn page, and this is a great opportunity to double down on your efforts there. This may also be a sign that your LinkedIn presence isn’t growing, and maybe it’s best to forget about it.
Follower growth
Another way to approach the follower count is to look at growth. This shows you whether you’re trending up (and fast), or if sadly, your followers are leaving you.
If increasing your follower numbers is a key metric, then the growth rate should be too. If you can show consistent growth over several months, you can justify the effort and dedication you’ve put in.
Again, you can also single out faster-growing profiles and put extra effort in those. If you’ve put some time into Pinterest, for example, and the rate of growth is stagnant, there’s simply no reason to keep slaving away.
In this case, you may want to cut the cord.
Luckily, monitoring follower growth is incredibly easy. You can happily do it with a simple spreadsheet, updated each month. Or, there are plenty of social media tools to use, so you barely have to lift a finger.
Social media mentions
As Valerie explained, mentions are a useful way to measure brand awareness and find out who’s really talking about you online.
Closely tracking mentions shows you:
- How engaged users are with your content
- The best days and times to share on social
- Whether users like your product or service
And you shouldn’t just measure your own mentions. By tracking competitors’ social media mentions, you can compare your own performance against theirs. If your goal is to eat into their market share – or even to attract some of their customers – monitoring their mentions is a must.
This is also perfect for product launches. Valerie explained how she tracks mentions closely after a new Klipfolio product is released, to see whether their promotional efforts are paying off.
It’s a way to make sure that you’re having an impact, rather than just going through the marketing motions.
Brand sentiment
Sentiment analysis is a useful tool to quickly understand what people think about your brand online. Each tweet, Facebook post, or forum mention is assigned a positive, negative, or neutral sentiment:
For many brands, the most important thing to track is negative mentions. We all want to believe that our businesses are popular and well-liked, but unflattering comments can pop up at any time. That’s why it pays to keep track.
As Valerie says, “if you’re getting a lot of negative mentions, and you’re not handling them on your social channels, they’re going to keep climbing.”
Positive tweets also offer opportunities. Be sure to reach out to happy customers and brand advocates, and encourage them to continue spreading the word.
Again, this is great for product launches. You can monitor the name of a new product to see whether the reception is generally positive, or if you need to act quickly to make changes.
Top influencers
We talk about influencer marketing a lot at Mention. We know that influencers can help you grow your audience quickly, and they usually come a lot cheaper than advertising. Often, they’re free!
Monitor the influence of the people talking about you online. Increases in influence usually mean that you’re being written about in industry news publications, or talked about by important people on social media. And that’s definitely a good thing!
Plus, it’s very easy. Good social listening tools come with influence scores:
Find out who your most valuable supporters are, and encourage them to keep up the good work.
Tracking your top influencers can also lead to memorable and effective marketing campaigns. We worked with influencers in our Real Smart Marketing series, where we asked well-known marketers to share their secrets. They kindly agreed:
These videos have been shared far more than any of our others, and a lot of people seem to enjoy them. That’s always a good thing.
Impressions and Reach
Impressions and reach are two social media metrics that help you understand your current and potential audience and how aware they are of your brand. These metrics are particularly important if your social media marketing goals center on brand awareness and brand perception.
Impressions
Impressions are simply how many times a post shows up in users’ timelines.
Reach
Reach is the number of unique viewers a post has (or could have). This is typically your follower count plus the follower counts of the accounts that shared the post.
These social media metrics are best used in conjunction with other metrics to get a better overall view of how your social media content is performing. If you’re interested in increasing awareness of a specific marketing message, for example, looking at a combination of impressions and engagement (likes, shares, etc.) will be much more telling than looking at those metrics separately.
If you have high reach and high engagement, you’ve found a winning message. If you have high impressions but low engagement, your post didn’t inspire your followers to action.
Volume and Sentiment
Share of Voice in social media is how much of the market your brand owns compared to your competitors. There are two social media metrics we’re going to look at for Share of Voice: volume and sentiment. There are social listening tools that can make measuring Share of Voice a lot easier and less time-consuming.
Volume
Volume tells you how many people are talking about your brand, content, or industry on social media. This includes counts of how many times your username is tagged, you’re mentioned in a social media post without being tagged, or when your brand (or branded/related terms) is used in a hashtag.
When you’re not being talked about, it can mean a couple of different things. Either your message isn’t reaching your target audience or your message isn’t right for your target audience.
Sentiment
Sentiment is a measure of the feelings, opinions, and attitudes consumers have and express about your brand on social media. Where volume tells you “how many,” sentiment gets into the context of your mentions, shares, and comments. Positive sentiment about your brand should be your goal.
There are a few benefits of tracking social media sentiment for your brand. First, knowing how your message is being received makes it a lot easier to take corrective measures if something goes wrong with your message. Next, it helps support customer service activities since you’re able to identify negative sentiment and address it before it spreads. Finally, you can analyze sentiment for your competitors’ messaging and use that to inform your own brand messaging.
The easiest way to track volume and sentiment is through social listening. Here are the best social media listening tools on the market right now.
Likes, Comments, Shares, and Clicks
Engagement metrics like comments, shares, clicks, and likes show how many people are interacting with your content. Engagement is a pretty big category of social media metrics and tends to be the only thing that those new to social media marketing track. When tracked alone, however, engagement metrics don’t provide much real value; they’re mostly vanity metrics.
That’s not to say that vanity metrics are entire without value. According to the Content Marketing Institute, the value of a vanity metric lies in measuring non-transactional marketing goals like brand awareness, sentiment, and share of voice in addition to optimizing social media campaigns and troubleshooting marketing problems. High engagement rates can also tell you how responsive your audience is and give you an indication of how many active and engaged followers you have.
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is the number of engagements with your content divided by either impression or reach. A high engagement rate means that the people who saw the post find it interesting.
Likes, Shares, Comments, and Clicks
These are individual engagement metrics that add up to give you a total number of engagements for your posts or profile.
Looking at a single engagement metric isn’t going to give you the context you need to make educated decisions about your social media marketing strategy. We encourage you to analyze a combination of metrics including engagement metrics but not solely focusing on these metrics.
It’s also important to remember that not all of your posts will require engagement. For example, if you post something purely for informational or aesthetic purposes it might not matter to you if it has low engagement. On the other hand, if you’re getting low engagement on posts where there is a call to action it’s a signal that something about your post needs to be adjusted. At that point, you can test the same post with a different call to action or try a new post with the same caption to see what works.
Referrals, Conversions, and Click-through Rates
Conversion metrics like referrals and conversions show you the effectiveness of your engagement. While “conversions” tends to mean “purchases” to many, it can really be anything that you are asking your followers to do. Hands down the easiest way to track both referrals and conversions are by using analytics software like Google Analytics or Mixpanel.
Referrals
Referrals are how visitors get to your website. In your web analytics software, you’ll see referrals broken down into sources. For social media, you’ll be monitoring the “Social” source which you can then drill down into to find referral data for specific social media platforms.
Conversions
Conversions happen when someone buys something from your site or completes an action that you’ve requested (like registering for a webinar or signing up for your email list). A social conversion means that the visitor came to your site through social media and then converted in that same visit.
Click-through Rates
Click-through rate is the number of clicks you receive divided by the number of times your post is shown. So, if you had 5 clicks and 100 impressions, your CTR is 5%. When your CTR is high, it’s a pretty safe bet that your post is effective.
Top Engaging Social Channels
One of the major goals of social media marketing is to increase web traffic. You want people to go beyond liking your Facebook post.
You want them to visit your website and hopefully buy your product or service.
It’s important to monitor which channels are driving the most traffic to your website.
Beyond simple traffic, monitor what those social users do once they land on your site. Are they engaging with your web content, or leaving straight away?
By learning how they engage with your content you will be able to improve on your web content to make it more engaging so that you can reduce your bounce rate.
The longer users stay on your website, the more likely they are to make a purchase.
You can track your social referral traffic in Google Analytics.
Conversions
You’re on social media because you want to convert more people into your customers. Conversions are a metric not to be overlooked.
Monitor how many people visited your website from your social media profiles and purchased your product or service during that visit.
If you were running an ad on social media, you also need to track how many people converted into customers from that ad.
You also need to monitor other important actions that your fans took such as signing up for your weekly newsletter, downloading an app, scanning a QR code, etc.
Social Channels Revenue
Do your company executives a solid by assigning a monetary value to your social conversions.
While it’s exciting to say that X number of people became customers following your social media efforts, it’s even more exciting to the finance department when you can state the amount of revenue you’ve been able to bring in.
Use Google Analytics to set website goals for each conversion point. Add a dollar value to each conversion.
This way you can easily calculate the revenue generated by your different sources, including social media.
Conclusion
The social media marketing metrics come in different shapes, sizes, and types. There are many metrics to help you measure the performance of your SMM campaign. The social media metrics you should be paying attention are those numbers that will help you grow your traffic and connect with your targeted audience.