It’s no secret that social media has become a powerhouse for businesses. Any company not utilizing it has put itself at an extreme disadvantage.

Hopefully, at this point, you’re well-versed in social media and have been using an effective strategy for your business. While most businesses and marketers understand the need for a variety of social media components, such as content, engagement, and relevance, they don’t all take the time to monitor and analyze data.

This is unfortunate because without properly understanding and monitoring metrics, it’s easy to waste time, money, and effort on areas that aren’t performing. By paying attention to the right social media metrics, you can gauge the effectiveness of your strategy and determine what, if any, changes should be made.

In order to ensure you’re using a successful social media strategy, you’ll want to focus on a number of essential metrics. Take a look:

Social Media Metrics You Need to Focus on

Your Follower Count

A lot of marketers look at follower counts as simple vanity statistics. While it is definitely important to have a connected and engaged audience, not just a large one, it’s also important to have a good number of followers in order to increase brand awareness and reach.

By paying attention to your followers, including when your numbers have increased and why, as well as which accounts are performing better than others, you’ll be able to understand HOW you are attracting an audience. You’ll also have clarity about which accounts to focus on over others.

When you consider your follower count, you’ll discover any trends in increase/decrease. The things that you see happening with your followers will provide you with insight into when and how you are successful, as well as when and how you aren’t. Overall, this helps you to gain focus over your social media strategy. You’ll know what to post, when to post, where to post, and how to engage, for the best results.

Your Impressions/Reach

To monitor the metrics of your impressions and reach, you need to understand what they are. Your impressions show the number of times that a post shows up on the timeline or feed of a user. Even if the user doesn’t engage with your post in any way, they are still considered part of your impression. On the other hand, your reach refers to how many users see and pay attention to your content.

While both things refer to your post showing up, only reach measures a response of some kind. If both your reach and your impressions are low, then not many people are seeing your posts and even fewer are doing something about it.

From this information, you’ll know to take a look at your content and figure out why people aren’t connecting with it. You’ll know to reconsider what you’re putting out there and even if you’re targeting the right audience.

Low impressions and low reach will show you that there is definitely something amiss in your strategy, which gives you the opportunity to change it.

social media engagement

Your Engagement

Engagement is essential. It includes multiple components and is the main way to understand the way all of your efforts are perceived and resonating with your audience. The engagement metrics you will want to keep an eye on include reactions (likes, comments, shares, etc), the post engagement rate (the number of likes/comments divided by the number of impressions x one-hundred), and mentions (others mentioning your brand on social media).

When you pay attention to these engagement metrics, you will be able to see if your followers are truly engaged with the content you put out. You’ll also gain key information, including the most successful times, days, and ways to share posts. This information enables you to launch a more effective social media strategy with better content and intentional timing, to increase engagement and brand awareness.

Your Response Rate

Your response rate is the length of time it takes for someone in your company to get back to a customer or follower after they reach out. People expect to get a response from someone rapidly, often within an hour.

If people reach out to you on social media and it takes a while before your team responds, you’re not doing your customer service any favors. This will end up speaking poorly for your business and will likely end up losing your followers and potential customers in the end.

The good news is, it’s easy to remedy a low response rate. You can have someone come on board as a community manager, running your social media accounts and ensuring rapid responses to people on social media.

Without a team member intentionally focused on your engagement and responses on social media, it can be difficult to get back to people in a timely manner. However, when you become aware of the importance, you’re more likely to make the effort to get it done.

Your Conversions

The overall goal of everything you do on social media and beyond is conversions. If your efforts aren’t converting then something isn’t right.

By keeping an eye on your metrics and paying attention to how many visitors your website is getting from your social media accounts, how many of these visitors are converting into customers, and how many people are becoming customers directly from your social media ads, you’ll have a good idea if your efforts are successful.

While getting leads to convert into customers is the overall goal, there are other types of actions that you will want people to take. You can easily monitor these as well to determine the effectiveness of your content and profiles. These actions include downloading something, subscribing to your newsletter or website, or following another of your accounts.

Watch all of these metrics to see if people are responding to your efforts. If you aren’t getting the conversions and actions you should be, it’s a pretty clear sign that you need to change something.

A strong social media presence is an essential part of a digital marketing strategy. It gives you the ability to exponentially increase your reach, build a loyal following, and gain the conversions you need for success.

The best way to ensure that your social media presence is up to par and delivering the results you want, is to focus on certain metrics regarding your profiles, content, and more. Monitor your follower count, your reach and impressions, your engagement, response rate, and your conversions.

Doing so will help you determine what changes, if any, need to be made in order to make your social media presence more effective. It gives you the opportunity to increase your efforts and focus on the aspects of your online profiles that need to be redone. In the end, monitoring certain metrics is key to a successful social media strategy and to your overall business.

Published On: January 31st, 2023 / Categories: Inbound Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media /