The most important social media marketing metrics and what they mean.
Social media has taken over the world. It’s everywhere – from sharing your child’s birthday with your friends to promoting your company’s new competition to potential customers.
Brands are now turning away from traditional advertising and using Facebook and Instagram to stay relevant. So if you want your business to get peoples’ attention, you’ll need to get on the virtual train too.
To successfully run your social media marketing campaign, you’ll need to track several metrics. Read on to learn the most important social media marketing metrics, and what they mean for your business.
Reach
Reach is exactly what it sounds like – it measures how many people your posts have reached.
Imagine being able to measure the virtual conversation around your brand and how much buzz it’s created. Thanks to the reach metric, you can. This lets you know if your content is making a difference – a broader reach means that people understand your message, and are talking about it. Low reach can indicate that your content is not relevant to your audience, so keep an eye on that metric and pivot your content so it’s relevant to your followers.
PRO TIP: Show your face! Content from you and with you in it will perform a lot better than stock images or video.
But a high reach isn’t all that matters. It needs to be used with engagement metrics to see if people are interacting with your brand. Remember to use reach in combination with replies, retweets, and clicks.
Volume
Imagine being in a room full of people. If everyone is talking all at once, it’s going to be quite noisy. The volume metric is the same. It tracks how many people are talking about your brand.
The more that people talk about your brand – by tagging, posting, replying, and retweeting – the higher your volume is. Use this metric to see what times people are online and schedule your posts accordingly.
Engagement
Engagement is perhaps one of the most important metrics you need to follow. It tracks replies, retweets, shares, comments, and likes.
But why do marketers consider engagement so crucial? Because it measures how, and how often, people are responding and engaging to your posts.
This helps you track people who are spreading your content and see what types of posts they enjoy. Engagement will also help you re-evaluate your strategies and align metrics.
Share of Voice
It’s easy to track your own business’s progress. But that may not help you stand out from the competition out there. Thankfully there’s a metric that can help.
Share of voice is a social media version of competitor analysis. This metric helps you track your position among your competitors.
Measure your share of voice against other businesses in your industry. As all posts are public, you can learn the strategies of your competition, then apply them to your own marketing strategy.
PRO TIP: Use tools like SproutSocial or Brandwatch to assess your share of voice. Bear in mind that this metric is often used by bigger brands.
Influence
Unlike the other metrics, influence doesn’t focus on audience size, but the quality of engagement produced.
You can have a substantial impact on a small audience. For example, the followers of lesser-known influencers are usually more interactive. This shows that smaller audiences drive more conversation than larger ones.
PRO TIP: Use tools like Brandwatch (Peer Index) to measure influence. Again, this is more useful for big brands looking to influence a large audience.
What about Likes?
Yep, these are important too. Likes and emotion reactions indicate whether the content you’re posting is enjoyable.
Remember if you’re running ads, clicks, click through rate and other metrics are also important, but we’ll save that for another blog.
If you’re thinking about dipping your toes into the social media world to promote your business, we can help. Contact us today for a complimentary consultation.
