Take the time to understand which social media metrics actually matter to prevent yourself from falling into the trap of thinking that a lot of “likes” means you’re making the most of your social media efforts.
Here are six key metrics and how you can use them as a guide to develop content and measure your social media successes:
- Engagement Metrics
It is true that you shouldn’t only use “likes” to gauge how successful your social media efforts are, but you should pay attention to overall engagement. This includes tracking likes, shares and comments over a period of time. By doing this, you can calculate your amplification rate and your vitality rate. To calculate your amplification rate, your post “shares” can be divided by the number of people who engaged with a post. You can also determine your vitality rate by dividing the total number of “shares” your post gets, by the total number of views or reach, and then multiplying by 100 to get a percentage. Anything over one percent indicates vitality, which is a good sign.
- Reach/View Metrics
Knowing how many people are actually seeing your posts will be very helpful to glean insight into how well your profiles and respective content are performing. After all, the more people you reach, the better your odds of generating engagement or web traffic. To help tailor future posts, review your reach for each post (for example, through the “Insights” tab on Facebook and Instagram, or “Analytics” on LinkedIn) to learn which posts have the largest reach.
- Referral Metrics
Google Analytics provides a great tool for measuring referrals from social media. You’ll need to be sure that your post includes a clear Call to Action (CTA) directing your audience to your website. Visit Google Analytics and click “Acquisition” to track your social media post referrals.
- Follower Growth Metrics
Tracking the number of followers you’re accumulating will also help you to see if your content is interesting and/or relevant to your target audience. Social media platforms allow you to see the total number of followers, new followers and your average daily growth, all of which can help you determine what changes should be implemented or, alternatively, what types of posts you should concentrate on creating because they are leading to new followers.
- Demographic Metrics
Understanding who is following you can help inform your content. By reviewing the demographics of your followers, you can continue to produce content relevant to that demographic, while also identifying demographics for growth and developing new content based on those you’re hoping to attract. Again, the “Insights” tab on both Facebook and Instagram and the “Analytics” tab on LinkedIn will provide detailed information that will prove helpful.
- Bounce Metrics
Bounce metrics can be measured when your post includes a link to your website or a designated landing page. When followers on social media click on the link, it is tracked. If they leave the site immediately, this is known as a “bounce” and indicates that the content they reached wasn’t of interest. By monitoring your bounce rate through Google Analytics, you can determine what changes may need to be made to the web content in order to keep visitors on your site longer.
It’s worth investing time to measure your results from these metrics in order to help you make the most out of the energy and dollars put into your social media presence.
