Social media metrics are important because they prove you can measure how successful a campaign is, how well your social strategy is performing, and overall, the impact of social media on your area and organisation.
Analytics keep you aware of general social profile and brand health – you don’t know the impact of your social media presence until you have the data to back it up.
Engagement: how much audience accounts are interacting with your account and how often via actions taken e.g., likes, comments, shares, clicks, retweets, URL clicks
Engagement really comes down to how your content helps build a relationship with your audience. Every network will have some sort of overall engagement metric that is a total sum of smaller engagement metrics such as likes, comments, and shares and many of them have more than one type of metric, or different naming conventions, such as Retweets vs. Shares.
High engagement rates indicate audience health - how responsive your audience is and how many are real followers, interesting content types and your awareness of your brand.
Post engagement rate: The number of engagements divided by impressions or reach. A high rate means the people who see the post find it interesting.
Account mentions: Organic mentions, like @mentions that aren’t part of a reply, or tagging a brand in an Instagram story without prompting, indicate good brand awareness.
Like most metrics, looking at one engagement metric might not give you all the context you need to make full decisions for your strategy. Looking at a combination of metrics is a great way to learn more about what levers you can pull to meet your specific goals. For example, a post that receives a lot of likes but not comments or shares isn’t always bad.
Impressions are how many times a post shows up in someone’s timeline
Reach is the potential unique viewers a post could have (usually your follower count plus accounts that shared the post’s follower counts).
Frequently used but often confused, impressions and reach are each an important metric to track, especially if your goals for social are focused around brand awareness and perception.
Using native analytics tools in conjunction with independent social listening programs is the bestWhen you create a post on Facebook, you’ll want to look at how well each post performs. It’s also helpful to compare your posts to each other to see which ones perform the best.
Let’s say one of your business goals is to increase brand awareness, so you create a timely infographic that you share on Facebook.
To determine the success of your post, you’ll check performance metrics like reach and shares on your infographic post. You’ll know brand awareness is increasing if you see a growing number of likes on your page and greater engagement on your posts.
To use Instagram Insights, you must have a business profile account which is available through the platform’s mobile app
With an Instagram business account, you can track the performance of your photo and video posts on the platform. Look at top posts and view demographics to assess your audience, or take a deeper dive into impressions, reach, and engagement for each post.
When your area is a good fit for visual social content, you can use Instagram’s native analytics to find the right combination of image, content, hashtags, and post length.
Twitter is a great channel to test your metrics and quickly optimize your top-achieving content. By keeping an eye on the performance of your content over 30-day periods, you should have a firm grasp on how your posts track and what a typical engagement rate looks like for you.
Whether you’re seeking engagement and reach on your posts or tracking conversion rates on your ads, remember to choose metrics that matter for your operations. Growing your audience won’t have an impact if you aren’t driving engagement and conversions through your content. Don’t be afraid to reuse your best material.
Not only do LinkedIn’s analytics give you data on the engagement and impressions for your posts, but they also offer information on your audience.
Tapping into your networks to share news and updates gives you additional metrics to work with and expands your reach exponentially.
If post reach is one of your KPIs on LinkedIn, look at the content that gets the greatest amounts of engagement, likes, and shares when posted to your company page or shared by your employees as brand ambassadors.
It’s important to remember that only using the native analytics features will not give you a full picture. It is vital to create data benchmarks to help you measure success over time, and that you should always go by your own predetermined key performance indicators (KPIs) instead of what the native analytics programs tell you are your most successful posts.