Measuring social media metrics can feel daunting for marketing teams who flunked math classes. However, consistent reporting can help to prove the value of content types and campaigns and keep teams on track to reach business goals.
Mentions are an essential social media metric that illustrates brand awareness and public sentiment. This metric is tracked when people tag your business in their posts or share your content with their followers.
What You Need to Know
Social media metrics are more complex than calculus or algebra, but identifying the right ones to track can feel daunting. This guide breaks down the critical metrics agencies should track to prove their work and demonstrate ROI.
One of the most important metrics is reach, which measures the potential audience size for a piece of content. It is essential to understand this metric as a part of the whole picture, as it provides context for other engagement metrics (like clicks or retweets) and can help you compare your performance against competitors.
In refining digital strategies, it’s crucial to measure social media ROI. This pivotal metric gauges the effectiveness and returns generated by social media marketing efforts, contributing to informed decision-making for future campaigns.
Another key metric to track is the share of voice, which identifies the percentage of conversations about your brand on a particular platform. This metric can help you identify opportunities to increase brand awareness and grow your following. Mastering these crucial metrics will make optimizing client campaigns easier, boosting engagement rates and reporting on ROI to clients.
Identifying Key Metrics
The first step is to determine what metrics matter to your business. Choosing the right ones depends on your social media strategy and overall goals.
Key awareness metrics include impressions (the number of times a post is displayed, not clicks) and engagement rates (the percentage of followers responding to content with replies or retweets). Increasing these metrics will improve your overall reach.
But it’s also essential to focus on other KPIs that align with specific marketing campaigns, such as the conversion rate for call-to-action content or the percentage of leads generated from a specific program. This way, you can prove the ROI of your social media efforts to stakeholders. Creating a sharable metrics glossary can help new team members or outside collaborators make sense of your reports and quickly understand what matters. Making these glossaries part of your regular reporting schedule will ensure you can show the impact of your social media efforts across the organization.
Choosing the Right Metrics
The ROI puzzle is tricky because it’s not uncommon for businesses to invest time and resources into social media without seeing any return beyond a few vanity metrics. To correctly measure the impact of your social content, you need to track and analyze your results over an extended period.
For example, tracking your follower growth over a year is a great way to see the long-term impact of various content types and campaigns instead of only measuring your current follower count. In addition, comparing your current social media results to past ones can provide valuable insights into your effectiveness.
To maximize your social media ROI, measure the right metrics by connecting them to your key business goals and objectives. For instance, focusing on metrics like engagement, reach, and general traffic are valuable but won’t prove your marketing efforts’ effectiveness to the C-Suite unless they lead to specific business outcomes such as brand awareness, customer acquisition, or sales.
Getting Started
Whether you’re new to social media, an experienced marketing team member, or a business leader navigating digital transformation, it’s important to start tracking the right metrics to demonstrate ROI. This can include tracking how many people visit your website from a social media post, how much your Facebook followers have grown, and more.
Once you’ve decided which metrics to track, it’s time to start reporting them. Creating a consistent reporting cadence allows you to stay agile and make changes quickly when necessary. You can use monthly reports for health checks, quick experiments, and quarterly and yearly reports to show more significant shifts in performance and progress toward business goals.
Remember that social metrics are just numbers until you give them context through data storytelling. This makes them understandable for various stakeholders, from peers to the C-suite. Creating a sharable glossary that includes metric definitions and why they matter helps your team stay on the same page.
