Social media reporting and metrics

What's hot and what's not

When it comes to social media for your business, the most important thing most people want to know is, 'Is it worth it?'.

Whether you're investing your own time and efforts into your social media campaigns or paying a social media manager, you want to make sure your socials are performing well and attracting your ideal clients.

But from counting followers, through to looking at post engagement percentages, social media metrics aren't always the easiest things to gauge.

Some people think a million followers is their goal. And that's fine. Others are happy with a few followers who are all their ideal audience and are more likely to buy from them. And that's fine too.

As a business, there are some general, basic metrics that you should be tracking to help you with your social media goal-setting and campaign tracking.

What do I mean by social media metrics?

When I start working with a client, I ask them what their goal is for social media. Based on these goals, you create metrics to make sure your social media strategy hits the mark.

Metrics prove to you if your campaigns are successful and how your social media strategy is performing. They are the quickest way to show you if a content idea isn't working and help you to keep your social media channels performing well.

As an example, many clients say they want to increase their conversions to drive their audience to their website, to read a blog, to find out more information and to ultimately buy from them (or use their service). This would become your metric.

So you'd have a series of posts (or even a campaign) that has links through to your website. You can see the traffic being driven by your social sites and determine if you've had an increase in your conversion rate as a result.

The top 4 social media metrics to measure

1. Engagement

Social media engagement covers a broad range of metrics – likes, comments, retweets, shares, post engagement and account mentions, to name a few. When you have high engagement rates, it shows that you have real followers who are interested in your content and are 'engaged' with your brand.

You should look at all these different engagement metrics as focussing on just one may not give you the full picture. For example, you may share an image post that's only intended for likes so you'd measure these. However, if you've shared a post or caption or a call to action and don't see people sharing, commenting or clicking, this post wouldn't be performing well although there could be a few likes.

2. Awareness

When we refer to awareness, we're talking about impressions and reach. Impressions refer to how many times your post can show up in someone's timeline, and reach refers to the unique viewers your post could have. Awareness is often looked at hand in hand with engagement levels.

If you've written a post that you see has high impressions (i.e. a lot of people saw it – your network and their networks too) but low engagement, your post wasn't interesting for your audience (they didn't react or share it). But if you have a post that has both high impressions and high engagement, your content was very well received and was shared. These are the posts you want more of!

3. Referrals

If your goal of social media is to make more sales, you need to look at your social media referrals and conversion rates. To start, you should have Google Analytics installed on your website or eCommerce store. You can look at a report to see how much traffic is coming from your social channels and create more content that is driving people through.

One of Google's ranking factors is the CTR or Click Through Rate. You can use this as a social media metric to gauge how many CTRs are coming from your social efforts. If you're finding you're not getting too many CTRs, then you should take another look at your posts and your call to actions.

4. Customers

As with any marketing strategy, you should always have your customer in mind. One of the biggest things I tell my clients is that I can drive traffic to them, but they need to be responsive to their customers. Customers are the ones who will ultimately leave you reviews for the world to read, so you want to make sure you're on the ball.

Check your customer's response times. Are you answering them quickly, or responding to urgent requests? Are you responding to comments? Are you saying thanks for praise or their insight or comments on posts? Are you being human? If someone has taken the time to comment or react to your posts, you should be present to respond.

Feel like outsourcing to a social media manager?

If creating a social media strategy, measuring metrics and analysing the data isn't your idea of fun, you could consider outsourcing this part of your business to a social media manager. I'm here to help!

I'd love to hear about any success you've had with social media. What did you measure, and what did you find? Please feel free to share in the comments below.