Social Media Metrics To Track and Why
If you aren’t a numbers person, keeping track of metrics may not feel like your strong suit. Because there are a million and one different types of metrics to keep track of and they aren’t always the same across social media platforms, knowing the most important metrics to keep track of for your business can feel a bit like rocket science.
Let’s break down four major metric pillars you should be familiar with, the metrics that make up those pillars, and why those metrics are important to keep track across your social media accounts.
Engagement
Engagement on social media comes mainly in the form of likes, comments, shares, and saves. The name speaks for itself, these components are how people engage with your account and the content you share. Looking at your engagement metrics will help you measure the effectiveness of your content.
If your engagement rates are low on your pages, you might try switching up the type of content you’re sharing (like switching video content for static content), including an attention grabber to the top of your captions, and including more calls to actions in your captions to point your audience to your supplemental content or pages.
If engagement rates are low, you may want to make sure your content is truly providing value to your followers. We all love a puppy, but if someone is coming to you looking for marketing advice, the puppy won’t get them there. It may take a little trial and error to see what your community responds to and engages with the most! Take the opportunity to have some fun in creating new types of content!
Awareness
Awareness refers to impressions and reach. Impressions refer to the number of people that are setting eyes on your page and content. This doesn’t refer to how many people see your content and engage with it, just the amount of people that see it, whether it be on their news/ for you feed, by a search, or by visiting your page by their own navigation. Measuring these metrics will allow you to track your brand awareness and growth over a period of time. The more impressions you’re receiving, the more likely it is that your content is memorable.
If your account or content aren’t getting the reach you’d ultimately like, there are a few things you can pay close attention to when posting. You can keep trying out different types of posts to see which get the most impressions. In addition to that, you can post at the optimal times for your audience (you can see this on your social media analytics pages), stay on top of trends, and utilize relevant hashtags.
Traffic
Keeping track of your social media traffic lets you know where new followers are finding you and which content you’re creating is bringing people to you. You can keep track of what posts you are sharing across social media channels that are bringing in new followers. Perhaps someone saw you on their Tik Tok for you page, clicked on the link in your Tik Tok bio, went to your Instagram, and followed you. That’s traffic!
The key here is optimizing the content that is most effective in bringing in traffic. If your Pinterest content is bringing you a lot of traffic on Instagram, you’ll want to make sure that the content you’re sharing on Pinterest is optimized to get the most out of it. That is just one example but it applies to all types of content!
ROI (Return On Investment)
If you’re selling anything in your business, whether it be a product or a service, paying attention to your return on investment or ROI is important to keep track of. Mainly, you should be paying attention to sales and conversion. For the sake of yourself and your employees, it’s important to understand your sales path and income sources to know what is converting leads into sales.
Social media is just as much of a place to sell for online business owners as it is to be social and share your life. If you’ve got a sales funnel running, you want to make sure you’re taking your audience through the customer journey with your content. Keeping your audience aware and engaged with your offers is important, but it’s also important not to get too in their face about it or dive right into a sale. You can use your content as a great spot to nurture your leads!
Which metrics are you ready to start keeping an eye on and improving? Let me know in the comments! Share this post with someone you know who may be looking for a little help in the metrics department.
