Are you using social media correctly? Are you engaging correctly? How much are you doing? How effective is social media for your business? There are a lot of questions about social media measurement metrics. My goal is to provide a step by step guide on the basics of social media measurement metrics.
There’s no shortage of marketing frameworks, models, and theories when it comes to social media metrics, but what about numbers to get us all on the same page? You know, things like Social Media ROI or Social Media Performance? It all starts with knowing which social media measurement metrics show true value and should be a part of your analytics strategy. Thankfully, there are ways to cut through the ‘noise’ and make sense of what is most important.#
Top Social Media Metrics to Monitor
1. Number of Social Media Followers
Number of social media followers is one of the many metrics that many marketers tend to dismiss as a vanity metric.
Having engaged followers is more important than having many followers.
However, if one of your goals is to increase your social media following or brand reach, then you need to know how many followers you have.
When working to increase your brand reach, it’s important to know how many social followers you have managed to gather over time.
You may find out that some of your accounts are doing better than others. You want to focus more on the ones that are attracting more audiences than the ones that aren’t.
Another way to approach social media followers is to look at follower growth rate over time.
Are your followers growing or are you losing followers? By examining the follower growth rate, you’ll be able to identify any trends in your growth.
Having a consistent growth rate over several months will help you justify the effort and dedication you’ve put in.
Again, the follower growth rate will help you single out faster-growing profiles so that you can cut the cord on profiles that remain stagnant, or identify which social profiles need a little bit more love.
Most social media profiles will show you your follower count in their analytics section.
You can use a simple spreadsheet to monitor your follower growth each month.
2. Impressions and Reach
If you’re interested in increasing brand awareness and perception, then reach and impressions should be in your social media analytics report.
Reach refers to the number of unique social media users who have seen your content. It indicates how viral your content has gone.
Impressions, on the other hand, show the number of times a post shows up in a social media user’s timeline.
Impressions give you insight on the number of people who saw your posts even if they didn’t click, comment, or engage with that post in any other way.
The biggest difference between impression and reach metrics is that impressions measure the total number of times your content is seen by the audience.
Reach, on the other hand, is the number of people actually seeing your content.
So, why are these metrics important?
Impressions and reach indicate how your social media engagement is doing. When your impressions and reach are low, it’ll result in a lower engagement rate, since there’s fewer people seeing your post.
If this is the case, then you need to look at your content and make sure that it’s being received well by your audience.
Another thing that you need to look at is your target audience. Are you targetting the right audience?
3. Engagement
Engagement is what will prevent you from losing your social media followers. Engagement allows you to see how your social media efforts are resonating with your followers.
There are a few engagement metrics that you need to monitor:
- Likes, Comments, Retweets, Shares etc.: How many people like, comment on, retweet or share your content?
- Post Engagement rate: (# of likes and comments / # of followers) x 100. The higher the rate the more the love your content is receiving.
- Click Through Rate (CTR): # of clicks / # of impressions. CTR measures the number of people who click your link after seeing your post.
- Account Mentions: Monitor how many times your brand has been mentioned on social media. Account mentions help to measure brand awareness.
Monitoring your engagement metrics will help you know how engaged users are with your content.
It will also give you insights on the best days and times to share your content on social media platforms. Keyhole allows you to view account optimizations and can also tell you when the best time to post is.
Engagement will also let you know whether users like your product or service and most importantly when to launch new products on social media.
4. Volume and Sentiment
The volume metric indicates how much people are talking about your business or brand online. It counts mentions.
Sentiment shows you how people feel about your brand. To measure sentiment, monitor messages and relevant keywords online.
You can sort them into emotion-based categories such as sad, angry, and happy.
With these metrics, you get to know where you stand against your competitors when it comes to online conversations.
In other words, you get to see how many people are talking about your brand online and how they feel about it as compared to your competitors.
You can also choose to monitor specific keywords associated with your brand to find out your online volume and sentiment metrics around keywords outside of your name.
Don’t forget to monitor trends associated with volume and sentiment to see what’s most often associated with your brand.
5. Top Influencers
Influencer marketing is one of the best marketing strategies to implement for 2020.
Influencers can help you grow your audience and increase your sales significantly.
But how do you find the best influencers to work with?
Monitor the people talking about you online and the kind of influence they have. Monitor who your top supporters are and encourage them to keep engaging with your brand.
By monitoring your top influencers, it will help you know who to reach out to when creating effective marketing campaigns.
There are a number of good social listening tools that you can use to find your top influencers and their influence scores.
Remember, having a large audience does not necessarily mean an individual is influential. Just because someone has a lot of fans and followers, does not mean they have the influence to make them support your brand.
6. Response Rate and Time
40% of customers who share their complaint via social media expect to get a response within one hour.
This goes to show how important customer service support on social media is important.
Monitor your response rate and time on your social media profiles to determine whether you need a community manager in order to improve on this metric.
This metric will help you get insights into your overall customer service approach. You’ll know whether you need to restructure your strategy if most of your client issues went unresolved.
7. 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.
8. Amplification Rate
Amplification Rate is the ratio of shares per post to the number of overall followers.
Coined by Avinash Kaushik, author and digital marketing evangelist at Google, amplification is “the rate at which your followers take your content and share it through their networks.”
Basically, the higher your amplification rate, the more willing your followers are to associate themselves with your brand.
How to track it:
STEP 1: Add up the number of times a post was shared (e.g., retweeted, repinned, regrammed) during a reporting period.
STEP 2: Divide that number by your total number of followers and multiply by 100 to get your amplification rate percentage.
9. Virality Rate
Virality Rate is the number of people who shared your post relative to the number of unique views (i.e., impressions) it had during a reporting period.
Like the other metrics on this list, virality rate goes beneath the surface. It’s about more than just likes.
“A post that gets 17,000 likes may only get 0.1% virality,” writes Nicolas Gremion, “while another post that receives 10,000 likes gets 9.97% virality—and that’s a far better post.”
How to track it:
STEP 1: Measure a post’s impressions.
STEP 2: Measure a post’s shares.
STEP 3: Divide the number of shares by the number of impressions and multiply by 100 to get your virality rate percentage.
Conversion metrics
These numbers demonstrate the effectiveness of your social engagement.
10. Conversion rate
Conversion Rate is the number of visitors who, after clicking on a link in your post, take action on a page (e.g., subscribe to your newsletter, download a gated content asset, register for a webinar) against that page’s total visitors.
A high conversion rate means your content is valuable and compelling to the target audience. From a social media standpoint, it’s a sign that your post was relevant to the offer. In other words, it kept its promise.
How to track it:
STEP 1: Create a post with a call-to-action link. Use a URL shortener to make it trackable.
STEP 2: Place a “cookie” on the user’s machine. Doing so attaches the lead to a campaign.
STEP 3: Use the campaign reporting to track the total number of clicks and conversions generated by the post.
STEP 4: Divide conversions by total clicks and multiply by 100 to get your conversion rate percentage.
Note: A post’s conversion rate can be high even if traffic is low. The two metrics are mutually exclusive.
11. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-Through Rate, or CTR, is how often people click on the call-to-action link in your post.
Not to be confused with other engagement actions (e.g., shares, likes, comments), your CTR is specifically tied to a link that brings the audience to additional content.
Tracking CTR, often and accurately, will give you invaluable insight into how compelling your offer is to the target audience.
How to track it:
STEP 1: Measure the total clicks on a post’s link.
STEP 2: Measure the total impressions on that post.
STEP 3: Divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions and multiply by 100 to get your CTR percentage.
Note: Don’t forget to measure clicks and impressions within the same reporting period.
12. Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate, is the percentage of page visitors who click on a link in your post, only to quickly leave the page they land on without taking an action.
Bounce rate lets you measure your social media traffic—and, in turn, ROI—against other sources of traffic (e.g., traffic from a Facebook post vs. traffic from an organic Google search).
If your social media bounce rate is lower than that of other sources, it’s proof that your social media campaigns are targeting the right audience—and, in turn, driving high-value traffic.
How to track it:
STEP 1: Set up Google Analytics.
STEP 2: Open the “Acquisition” tab, and look under “All Traffic” for the “Channels” segment.
STEP 3: Click on the “Bounce Rate” button, which will rank all of the channels from lowest bounce rate to highest.
Note: Demonstrating the relative effectiveness of your social media efforts will go a long way in proving its value to the business.
13. Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
Cost-Per-Click, or CPC, is the amount you pay per individual click on your sponsored social media post.
Whether you choose to advertise on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Linkedin, don’t focus on your total spend. Instead, look to your CPC. It’ll help you weigh if your investment in attention is efficient, or wasteful.
How to track it:
STEP 1: Check your platform’s Ad Manager.
STEP 2: Check it often.
Note: Never let your CPC campaigns go unattended for an extended period of time.
14. Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
Cost Per Thousands Impressions, or CPM, is the amount you pay every time a thousand people scroll past your sponsored social media post.
Unlike in a CPC campaign, a CPM post won’t necessarily drive action. It’ll only create impressions, views. Therefore, CPM is a faster and less expensive way to split test content.
How to track it:
STEP 1: Check your platform’s Ad Manager.
STEP 2: Check it often.
Note: Never let your CPM campaigns go unattended for an extended period of time.
15. Social Media Conversion Rate
Social Media Conversion Rate is the total number of conversions that came from social media, expressed as a percentage.
Understanding this metric will give you clear insight into the effectiveness of each post in a campaign. In other words, it answers this question: how well does this offer resonate with our target audience?
How to track it:
STEP 1: Create a link in the post using a shortened URL that places a “cookie” on the user’s machine.
STEP 2: Measure your total number of conversions.
STEP 3: Divide the social media conversions by the total number of conversions and multiply by 100 to get your social media conversion rate percentage.
16. Conversation Rate
Conversation Rate is the ratio of comments per post to the number of overall followers you have.
It’s another metric coined by Avinash Kaushik—and it’s better than tracking comments without any context. After all, getting an average of 20 comments per post is a lot more impressive if you only have 200 followers.
Tracking your conversation rate will help you understand how much of your audience is compelled to add their voice to the content you post on social. Or as Kaushik puts it, “Is what you are saying interesting enough to spark the most social of all things: a conversation?”
STEP 1: Use a tool like Hootsuite Analytics to pull the number of comments you received during a reporting period.
STEP 2: Divide that number by your total number of followers and multiply by 100 to get you conversation rate percentage.
Customer metrics
These numbers reflect how your active customers think and feel about your brand.
Conclusion
There are many metrics that we use as social media managers to measure the success of our social media campaigns. But which ones should you be monitoring?