Understanding social media metrics are crucial for online business owner but sometime it can be confusing. On top of that, it seems that there are new important metrics created on a weekly basis. But don’t worry our Melbourne SEO services and social media experts has narrow down those metrics. In this guide, we’ll take you through the most basic metrics that every business owner should pay attention to. And these metrics are generalized across social media channels.
What are social media metrics and why should you track them?
- Engagement: Likes, comments, shares and clicks
Engagement is a big umbrella and has several important categories to track. At its core, engagement boils down to how many and how often audience accounts interact with your account. Every social media platform has its own engagement metric. Most of them will show 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 how responsive your audience is and how many are “real” followers, interesting content types and your awareness of your brand.
Like most metrics, you cannot make a decision solely based on engagement rate. You need to look at a combination of metrics to learn more about what levers you can pull to meet your specific goals. - Awareness: Impressions & reach
If your goals for social are focused around brand awareness and perception, then impressions and reach are each an important metric to track.
At the post level:
- 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)
While impressions can tell you a lot about the potential your content has for visibility on social on its own, it’s still important to look at other metrics for ultimate performance context. For example, a post that with high impression count but a low engagement rate means that your post catch audience’s attention but wasn’t interesting enough for them to take action
- Share of voice: Volume and sentiment
Often used in public relations, share of voice indicates how much of the online sphere your brand is taking part in. Improving your share of voice is continuous goal, that you measure by benchmarking over time. You won’t always be able to maintain the highest share of voice unless you’re the only company in your field. But you can observe and learn how it ebbs and flows over time and consider the factors for those changes. - ROI: Referrals & conversions
Most applicable for companies with websites or e-commerce platforms, social referral traffic and conversions are tied to both sales and marketing goals, and ultimately major business goals.
You can know how users land on your website by looking at referrals. A lot of time, you’ll see them broken down into sources. “Social” is usually the source/medium you’ll be monitoring, and then it’s broken down by network.
Conversions count every purchase someone make on your site. A social conversion means they visited via a social media channel and then purchased something in that same visit. - Customer care: Response rate & time
Metrics mention before focused on the performance of posts and social media accounts. Now let’s evaluate your customer’s experience with your brand? To evaluate customer care you need metric such as response rate and response time come in. They track how fast your team is responding to important messages and how many of them are actually being responded to. For multi-user accounts, you should also track how much each person is getting done.