Understanding the world of social media metrics can be very confusing, follower counts, post engagement percentages, profile visits, etc can be terms that one can’t comprehend at first glance. On top of that, there seems to be a new metric addition every week. With the ever-increasing social media metrics, how do you know which are the important ones and the ones worth tracking?

Are the metrics you’re tracking relevant for your business. In this article, you will be taken through the most basic metrics that every social media influencer or company and interested personnel should pay attention to based on your goals. These mentioned metrics will be generalized across all social media platforms. The phrases of these key metrics may vary for each social media platform but the main measurements that you’ll want to focus on to stay at the top of your goal setting, KPIs, and campaign strategy will be covered.

In this article, you will get answers to questions such as what social media metrics are, how are these metrics important, how to find them, and what are metrics you should pay attention to. The specifics that you will track will vary from platforms to platforms, industry, campaigns, and businesses. This article should be considered as a basic guide to social media metrics and analytics.

What are social media metrics and why are they worth tracking?

Social media metrics are determined by your social media goals. For every social media goal, you will be able to find a social media metric that will help you see if your social media strategy is reaching its target.

For instance, let’s assume your business goal is to increase post conversions. Therefore your social media goal is also similar, to increase conversions via the use of the social media platform. Now that you have a clear goal in mind, you can easily identify the social media metric you will want to measure and the time frame to check the progress of your goal. For example, you decide that your goal is to increase the conversions by 25% in two months.

To achieve this goal you decide to run ads, include product tags and influencers. Now to measure your conversion rate you decide to look at the social traffic and conversion rate metrics based on those posts present in your website analytics.

The answer as to why social media metrics are so important is because they can measure the success rate of a campaign, the performance of your social strategy, and the ultimate reason social media metrics the impact these campaigns have on your business if any. These metrics also provide you with the opportunity to showcase the performance of your strategy to other executives. Also providing constant and consistent social media metrics reports can amount to major shifts with regards to your social team, think about it, a budget increase as well as increased access to resources.

And the last but most important significance of social media metrics is they inform you about the general health of your social brand and profile – one can never truly know the impact of a social media platform unless they have the data to back it up.

How to measure the right social media metrics?

All social media platforms provide the audience with native metrics analytics to explore. For Facebook, you can find these metrics in the insights tab. In Twitter, you can explore these metrics in Twitter analytics. On Instagram and Pinterest you will require a business account before you can access these data. For businesses that have just started and do not have a high budget visiting these native analytics tools individually can be a good point to start.

Pulling out these reports, assembling them manually, creating reports, and pulling together all these various network data can be time-consuming which is why investing in a social media analytics tool that sits right in your budget and needs. The time and energy you save on making these gathering data and compiling these reports will more than make up for the money you spend on buying these tools.

Whatever method you choose it is important to monitor and document your metrics report consistently to track your progress towards your goals. Now that you have figured out your goals and the method of your data monitoring, narrowing down metrics in a vast sea of options can be a pickle. Simple metrics such as conversion are not hard to understand however there are some which can be pretty complicated. What you must do is pay attention to those metrics that come in handy to your goal. Every metric has a meaning and purpose the important aspect is to translate the meaning to your understanding.

Engagement: Comments, likes, and shares

Engagement is an umbrella term and encompasses several different categories of metrics.
The engagement rate is a common metric and is often used to monitor and track the involvement of your audience with your brand and the effectiveness of your campaigns to increase this interaction. Consumers that like your brand interact with the brand through methods such as likes, comments, and social sharing.

Engagement is nothing but how much does the audience accounts interact with your account and how much. Every social media platform and network has a different version of the engagement metric that is a sum of smaller engagement metrics such as comments, likes, and shares. Some platforms have more than one type of metric or they offer different naming conventions for example Shares vs. Retweets. Increased engagement rates indicate a healthy audience acknowledgment of your posts, interesting content, and awareness of the brand.

  • Likes, shares, comments, retweets, tags, etc:

    Singular metrics such as likes, shares, etc are summed up. If you go through a Twitter report you will see a total number of engagements per profile and post.

  • Post engagement rate:

    The number of engagements by the number of impressions or reach will give you the engagement rate of a particular post. A higher post engagement rate means that people find your posts interesting.

  • Account mentions:

    Regular mentions that are not a part of a reply, story tag, or marketing strategy. Tagging a brand without the intention of promoting shows good brand awareness.

The essential tip about metrics is that it is always best to look at a combination of metrics to get a full and proper context to make a decision. This way you will be able to understand the specifics on which you need to work to achieve your brand goal. For instance, if a post receives a lot of likes but no comments and shares that does not necessarily mean a bad thing. The intention of the post might have been to present the audience with a beautiful picture with no such importance for the caption. However, if there was a call of action in the comments and yet the number of comments and shares lack there is a problem. Look at the bigger picture, do not be focused on particular metrics, it is important to have a bird’s eye view.

Reach

Social media reach and awareness are two different metrics both of which are essential to track if the goal is to promote your brand. Reach is the number of unique viewers your brand has due to a post. For posts with a higher reach count, it means that the content has most likely gone viral via posts and reposts.

Conclusion

To track the growth of your brand on social media platforms you must check social metrics. These metrics not only sac the time and energy spent on manual data collection but also show you the specifics you need to work on to achieve your goal. Amongst the many social media metrics available engagement and reach are by far the most important. This is why if your goal is to grow your social brand you need to pay attention to these metrics.