Understanding your social media presence is about knowing more than what you upload and who you upload it to. It’s about knowing why people act the way they do when presented with your content.
After all, as a business, your end goal is not to have people watch a video, or read through your text-based content. It’s to make them visit your e-store, like and follow your page, or subscribe to your newsletter.
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Important Social Media Metrics to Measure
On the other hand, networks like Facebook and Twitter give you so much actionable data which can, not only boost your social media presence, but it can also improve the infrastructure of your digital marketing as a whole.
In other words, it can help you understand who your average customer actually is, which makes your job of reaching out to them much easier. Either way, there are seven social media metrics your business needs to track and here are some of them.
1. Traffic
The first relevant metric you need to keep an eye on is definitely traffic, seeing as how it determines the reach of your posts, as well as how it sets the cap for the maximum number of conversions.
Sure, some may claim that traffic on its own doesn’t mean that much, yet, they tend to forget that 10 out of 10 people is the same number of customers/subscribers as the 1 percent of 100 people.
Regardless of the quality of your content or the audience, it’s always easier to make 1 percent than 10 percent conversions, which means that an increase in traffic gives a direct boost to your brand.
As for the way in which you can check this metric, people on WordPress needn’t look past their dashboard for answers. Just go to the My Blogs section and you’ll see an icon labeled as Stats. By clicking on it, it will reveal the overall traffic of your website.
Aside from this, you can also turn to monitoring plugins and websites. Standard platform for such research would be Google Analytics but there are other tools out there for you to explore.
2. Engagement rate
The next thing you need to consider is the engagement rate. The thing about the engagement rate is that it separates passive observers from qualified leads. Sure, it’s possible for a person to make a purchase as soon as they enter your e-store and even to do it as their first action on your website.
Unfortunately, this is highly unlikely. As a result, you need to keep track of the engagement rate and first see how your audience is reacting to all the micro-interactions you’ve laid in front of them. Think about the customer lifecycle.
Even people with the greatest chance of becoming customers have to pass through several stages (visitor, lead, consumer) before they unleash their full potential.
Another thing worth knowing is what a good engagement rate looks like. According to some standards, everything above 1 percent is a good engagement rate, while everything between 0.5 percent and 0.99 percent is considered average (at least for Facebook).
Still, keep in mind that Facebook isn’t necessarily standard for the industry, seeing as how it calculates its engagement rate on a bit different formula.
They divide users by the total reach of the post and multiply it by 100. To find these engaged users, you need to go to the insights page, choose export data and then set the range in the filter. The spreadsheet you receive will contain the data regarding the engagement rate.
3. Referrals
To you as a business, the website’s audience will be your main concern, yet, understanding where they come from might be equally relevant. Furthermore, when it comes to referrals, you’re not just interested in sheer numbers.
You also want to know the average rate of return and the duration of visit of your first-time visitors. Naturally, the amount of referrals also depends on the shareability of your content, which is yet another thing to take into consideration.
4. Conversion rates
At the end of the day, referral rates do not equal money. So, in that regard, we need to take a look at the conversion rates of your social media channels to see the actual ROI of each. Hence, with some sophisticated media monitoring tools, you can analyze just how well your channels are doing and which ones are bringing in the most money.
Also, by checking the oscillations in your conversion rates in a certain time-frame, you can pinpoint the strategies that were trending the most and thus brought in cash, and which ones need replacing.
This is why conversion is such a key metric, especially so for retailers, as it’s the only one that shows concrete results of your overall social media marketing campaigns and how worth they’ve all been.
5. Video Retention
Facebook audience watches about 100 million hours of video every single day. Because of this, more and more content creators turn towards this particular format. Nevertheless, there’s a huge difference between people who watch the first 10 seconds of your 10 minutes’ long video, and those who stick to the end.
Of course, it’s completely possible that a person who stopped watching had some incredibly good reason to do so, yet, when surveying large numbers, this will be an indicator of how compelling your video actually is. It doesn’t even have to be a definite judgment on the video’s quality – just on its social media-friendliness.
6. Potential reach
Next, it’s essential to address one thing. The potential reach of your Facebook posts is not unlimited, even though, in theory, it might appear to be so. The potential reach is a simple equation that a lot of people have never heard of.
It’s calculated not only by the potential of every single person online (on a certain social network) at the time of your posting, but also by the combined number of people posting at the same time. In other words, there’s a chance that your post will be lost in myriad of others getting uploaded at the same time.
Another thing worth mentioning is that there’s a difference between the reach and impressions. The first one represents the number of people that the post has reached (regardless of how many times they saw it), while the latter determines the total number of times the post was seen (regardless of the number of people).
Needless to say, the reach is much more important when it comes to ads, while, when estimating the efficiency of organic content, impressions may play a more pivotal role.
7. Likes and follows
Most people believe likes and follows to be merely vanity metrics, seeing as how there’s no way of knowing in which way they translate into sales or conversions. Still, we could unanimously agree that it’s better for your brand to be liked than to be disliked, and that the greater number of followers inevitably means a greater reach.
In other words, even if they were never to become paying customers, people following your brand might, at one point, decide to share some of your content and, in this way, put you in touch with a potential customer. Those likes make your business look good, and give a boost to your company’s credibility in the digital world.
Conclusion
By keeping an eye on these seven social media metrics alone, you will learn more about your business and its public image than you have ever thought possible.
The best part of this, however, lies in the fact that it presents you with so much actionable information to use in your next digital marketing campaign. All in all, having a data-driven strategy instead of improvising and making educated guesses is always a positive thing.
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