Social media metrics 101

The world has turned digital. With millions of daily users, if you’re not managing your social media accounts correctly, then you’ll be left behind in the online race to the top.

This article will teach you the key social media metrics and how to use them to create winning campaigns.

What are social media metrics?

Social media metrics are the indicators of your marketing performance across your social media pages. Through metrics, you can measure the success of your marketing efforts on social media.

But before measuring the results, you need to set your social media goals. What do you want to achieve? What results are you looking for?

For helping you understand what exactly you want to look into when setting up a social media campaign, let’s clarify what are the most important key metrics in social media marketing.

What are the key metrics in social media marketing?

1. Impressions

Impressions are the number of times a social media user is exposed to your content. They are calculated each time your post is shown to the end-users, whether they take action on your post or not.

To increase the chances that users will click on your posts, you need to take into consideration: the design of your post, the caption, the call to action, even the colours that you use. If you struggle with putting together a good social media campaign with a high impression rate, let us give you a hand.

2. Reach

Reach shows how many unique users have seen your social media content. With new algorithms being introduced every day on social media websites, reach is one of the metrics that are most affected in organic posting. This is why companies are investing more in paid social media marketing. The good news is that post boosting or ad campaigns have the advantage of showing your content even to users who are not following your page. This increases your chances of reaching more users.

3. Clicks

This one is self-explanatory. Clicks are the total number of times that your content was clicked on. In order for users to click on your posts, they need to be appealing, engaging, interesting, and to tell a story. We find that story-telling doubles the chances of clicks when the story relates to your audience.

4. Unique Clicks

Unlike ‘clicks’, unique clicks refer to the number of unique users that clicked on your content. It is highly likely that a unique user clicks your post multiple times. This will count as 1 unique click and it will add to the total number of “clicks” each time they tap on that post.

5. Engagement

You’ve heard this before, but what really is it?

Engagement refers to the actions people are taking on your ads or posts on social media. It is the way users respond to your content. Like, comment, share, repost, retweet, are just several ways in which users may engage with your content.

While engagement does not necessarily, or immediately, translate into conversion results, it is an excellent benchmark of your social media success, and it contributes to your brand awareness.

6. Social Media Conversion

Social Media Conversion is the total number of conversions that came from social media. A conversion is an action performed on your website, such as subscribing to your newsletter, downloading a white paper, or purchasing a product or service that you sell.

Social media conversion occurs each time a user clicks on a link included in your social media posts that takes them to your website, where they perform any of these actions.

7. Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

You will want to pay attention to Cost-Per-Click, as it relates to how much you spend per individual click. This is calculated for paid social media activities. In an ad campaign, it will show you which ads have a higher or lower CPC, allowing you to optimise your ads and budgets accordingly.

Why are social media marketing metrics important?

In social media marketing, metrics are important for understanding the results of your marketing efforts. Based on the metrics you get, you can optimise your marketing budgets and the time you spend on creating valuable content for your audience. Moreover, social media marketing metrics can reflect upon your sales funnel.

The metrics that you get through social media will help you make more accurate decisions on your future marketing efforts, but also on your sales strategy. For instance, you may find that certain audience segments have a lower conversion rate than the others.

This will inform your decision to apply dedicated sales strategies to raise the interest of these audience segments.

In a nutshell, social media metrics are important because they bring changes and improvements to your business.