Social media marketing plays a crucial role in your business’s overall marketing success. Measuring the effectiveness of your posts across multiple social media channels is a critical component of determining whether or not your marketing strategy is working.
With an abundant amount of consumer data being posted on social media each day, marketers have come to rely on social listening tools to perform competitive research, target audience analysis, and product research.
Social media data is an essential source of strategic marketing information. At the center of these analytics is the gathering and analyzing of the consumer data you will use to build your marketing strategy.
What are social media analytics?
Social media analytics is the ability to gather data from social networks, such as audience demographics, and find meaning to support business decisions.
Social media metrics are important because they provide audience insight to measure their social media campaign performance. These analytics can also run a competitive analysis, which helps business owners get a leg up on their competition.
Pay special attention to different metrics for different platforms. For example, there are several key Facebook metrics to keep an eye on, while there are another set of Instagram metrics that matter the most.
But with 61 social media metrics, it can be challenging to find meaning within the data. Let’s take a look at which metrics are the most important and how you can improve their performance and your bottom line at the same time.
Which social media metrics are the most important?
No matter which social media platforms you utilize, you can easily find an analytics platform that will focus on different data points that will help you make strategic social media marketing decisions.
Marketers should use a social media analytics reporting tool to gather data across multiple social media platforms and use key metrics to improve their marketing campaigns and enhance the customer experience.
Let’s look at the essential social media analytics you need to keep an eye out for during your social media campaign.
Engagement
The engagement category is a blanket term for many different metrics. Your engagement rate tracks how often your audience interacts with your content and the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.
Engagement boils down to how much target audience accounts interact with your brand on social media and how often. To analyze engagement, take a look at the following metrics on your analytics report:
- Comments, likes, retweets, shares: These individual engagement metrics help you see the total number of direct engagements per post or social media account.
- Account mentions: Organic impressions, like @mentions that are unprompted, will demonstrate brand awareness.
- Post engagement rate: The number of engagements divided by impressions or reach. A higher rate means more people have found the post interesting.
When it comes to engagement, looking at one metric will not give you the context you need to make informed choices for your marketing strategy. You need to look at these numbers holistically to understand what moves will help you reach your goals.
The best way to encourage engagement is to post social media content that inspires users to interact.
This type of content should be eye-catching and targeted towards your audience demographics. For example, contests, questions, polls, and shareable GIFs are valuable content that will attract users to your social media accounts. Always use a unique hashtag so you can track your social media campaign progress.
Impressions and reach
If your goals are centered around brand perception and awareness, you need to focus on the impressions and reach metrics.
These two metrics are often confusing but have their specific purpose:
- Impressions: How Many Times A Post Appears On A User’s Timeline/Feed
- Reach: The Potential Unique Views A Post Could Have (typically related to follower counts)
Impressions can tell you about the potential your content has as far as visibility on its own. Still, you need to look at a combination of impressions and engagements if you are looking to build awareness and educate your audience.
If your post has strong impressions but a low engagement rate, it means your post didn’t inspire audiences to take action once users saw it on their feeds. A post with a high reach count and high engagement rates has gone viral through retweets and shares.
Are you looking to enhance your reach? Research the optimal posting times for your industry and social media platform of choice. Experiment with short-form videos and curate user-generated content to post on a regular schedule.
Finally, post less. This may seem counterintuitive, but posting more than three times a week means your target audience becomes jaded by your content and scrolls right by.
CTR, referrals and conversions
Companies with e-commerce platforms know that social referral traffic and conversions are linked to their sales and marketing goals.
To track these analytics and set benchmarks, you’ll need a social media strategy that incorporates social listening and a traffic analytics program, such as Google Analytics.
Referrals are the channels through which users reach your website’s landing page. In web analytics, you’ll be able to see these channels broken down into sources. Because you are focusing on your social media analytics, you’ll look at the referrals by platform.
Conversions occur when someone purchases a product or service from your website. A social conversion means they came from a social media platform and made a purchase within that same visit.
Click-through rates, or CTR, compares the number of times people click on your content to the number of impressions you get. The higher the CTR, the most effective the social media ad.
Before you analyze these metrics, research your industry benchmarks so that you can monitor your social media ads and adjust them accordingly.
Use social media analytics tools to enhance your company’s social media performance
At the end of the day, your marketing team will use social media analytics to analyze each social media post’s effectiveness and impact. However, tracking data on an excel spreadsheet is time-consuming.
When you maintain so many different accounts across multiple social media platforms, data collection can get tricky. Using an AI-enhanced social analytics tool, like the one created by Metigy, allows you to reach more of your target audience in real=time and develop and a better understanding of your customer.
Social media analytics tools report back to you with informative data and actionable ideas. This allows you to reach more of your target audience in real-time and develop a better understanding of your customer.
Metigy’s social analytics tool saves you time and provides a customized social analytics dashboard with automated reports, KPIs, and customizable templates that you can share with your marketing team.
Stop wasting precious time creating and tracking large amounts of content. Use Metigy to make social media analytics manageable and meaningful.
