You’ve mastered the art of churning out social media content on a consistent basis. Your brands’ social media accounts are now all active with heightened engagement rates.
But, are you using your social media accounts correctly?
Is your business seeing any social media ROI?
Are you measuring your social media efforts effectively?
Let’s get straight to the point.
From Facebook metrics to Twitter metrics, to Youtube metrics and Instagram metrics, what should you be tracking?
Are these metrics performing up to your standards?
The good news is, it’s easier to measure your social media efforts than you imagine.
Let’s take a look at the 9 metrics that every company should be measuring right now and the best tools to use.
Top Social Media Metrics to Track
1. Number of Social Media Followers
The number of social media followers is one of the many metrics that some marketers tend to dismiss as a vanity metric.
Having engaged followers is more important than having many followers.
However, if one of your goals is to increase your social media following or brand reach, then you need to know how many followers you have.
When working to increase your brand reach, it’s important to know how many social followers you have managed to gather over time.
You may find out that some of your accounts are doing better than others. You want to focus more on the ones that are attracting more audiences than the ones that aren’t.
Another way to approach social media followers is to look at follower growth rates over time.
Are your followers growing or are you losing followers? By examining the follower growth rate, you’ll be able to identify any trends in your growth.
Having a consistent growth rate over several months will help you justify the effort and dedication you’ve put in.
Again, the follower growth rate will help you single out faster-growing profiles so that you can cut the cord on profiles that remain stagnant, or identify which social profiles need a little bit more love.
Most social media profiles will show you your follower count in their analytics section.
You can use a simple spreadsheet to monitor your follower growth each month.
2. Impressions and Reach
If you’re interested in increasing brand awareness and perception, then reach and impressions should be in your social media analytics report.
Reach refers to the number of unique social media users who have seen your content. It indicates how viral your content has gone.
Impressions, on the other hand, show the number of times a post shows up in a social media user’s timeline.
Impressions give you insight into the number of people who saw your posts even if they didn’t click, comment, or engage with that post in any other way.
The biggest difference between impression and reach metrics is that impressions measure the total number of times your content is seen by the audience.
Reach, on the other hand, is the number of people actually seeing your content.
So, why are these metrics important?
Impressions and reach indicate how your social media engagement is doing. When your impressions and reach are low, it’ll result in a lower engagement rate, since there are fewer people seeing your post.
If this is the case, then you need to look at your content and make sure that it’s being received well by your audience.
Another thing that you need to look at is your target audience. Are you targeting the right audience?
3. Engagement
Engagement is what will prevent you from losing your social media followers. Engagement allows you to see how your social media efforts are resonating with your followers.
There are a few engagement metrics that you need to monitor:
- Likes, Comments, Retweets, Shares, etc.: How many people like, comment on, retweet, or share your content?
- Post Engagement rate: (# of likes and comments / # of followers) x 100. The higher the rate the more the love your content is receiving.
- Click Through Rate (CTR): # of clicks / # of impressions. CTR measures the number of people who click your link after seeing your post.
- Account Mentions: Monitor how many times your brand has been mentioned on social media. The account mentions help to measure brand awareness.
Monitoring your engagement metrics will help you know how engaged users are with your content.
It will also give you insights into the best days and times to optimize your social media share and post your content on various platforms. Keyhole allows you to view account optimizations and can also tell you when the best time to post is.
Engagement will also let you know whether users like your product or service and most importantly when to launch new products on social media.
4. Volume and Sentiment
The volume metric indicates how much people are talking about your business or brand online. It counts mentions.
Sentiment shows you how people feel about your brand. To measure sentiment, monitor messages and relevant keywords online.
You can sort them into emotion-based categories such as sad, angry, and happy.
With these metrics, you get to know where you stand against your competitors when it comes to online conversations.
In other words, you get to see how many people are talking about your brand online and how they feel about it as compared to your competitors.
You can also choose to monitor specific keywords associated with your brand to find out your online volume and sentiment metrics around keywords outside of your name.
Don’t forget to monitor trends associated with volume and sentiment to see what’s most often associated with your brand.
5. Top Influencers
Influencer marketing is one of the best marketing strategies to implement these days.
Influencers can help you grow your audience and increase your sales significantly.
But how do you find the best influencers to work with?
Monitor the people talking about you online and the kind of influence they have. Monitor who your top supporters are and encourage them to keep engaging with your brand.
Monitoring your top influencers, it will help you know who to reach out to when creating effective marketing campaigns.
There are a number of social listening tools that you can use to find your top influencers and their influence scores.
Remember, having a large audience does not necessarily mean an individual is influential. Just because someone has a lot of fans and followers, does not mean they have the influence to make them support your brand.
6. Response Rate and Time
As per reports, 79% of customers will leave if a customer support team is unresponsive with their question. Also, upon leaving a negative feedback, 53% of customers would expect a response from businesses within a week.
This goes to show how important customer service support on social media is important.
Monitor your response rate and time on your social media profiles to determine whether you need a community manager in order to improve on this metric.
This metric will help you get insights into your overall customer service approach. You’ll know whether you need to restructure your strategy if most of your client issues went unresolved.
7. Top Engaging Social Channels
One of the major goals of social media marketing is to increase web traffic. You want people to go beyond liking your Facebook post.
You want them to visit your website and hopefully buy your product or service.
It’s important to monitor which channels are driving the most traffic to your website.
Beyond simple traffic, monitor what those social users do once they land on your site. Are they engaging with your web content, or leaving straight away?
By learning how they engage with your content you will be able to improve on your web content to make it more engaging so that you can reduce your bounce rate.
The longer users stay on your website, the more likely they are to make a purchase.
You can track your social referral traffic in Google Analytics.
8. Conversions
You’re on social media because you want to convert more people into your customers. Conversions are a metric not to be overlooked.
Monitor how many people visited your website from your social media profiles and purchased your product or service during that visit.
If you were running an ad on social media, you also need to track how many people converted into customers from that ad.
You also need to monitor other important actions that your fans took such as signing up for your weekly newsletter, downloading an app, track QR Code scans and performance, etc.
9. Social Channels Revenue
Do your company executives a solid by assigning a monetary value to your social conversions.
While it’s exciting to say that X number of people became customers following your social media efforts, it’s even more exciting to the finance department when you can state the amount of revenue you’ve been able to bring in.
Use Google Analytics to set website goals for each conversion point. Add a dollar value to each conversion.
This way you can easily calculate the revenue generated by your different sources, including social media.
Best Social Media Tools to Monitor Your Metrics
1. Keyhole
Keyhole is one of the best and most affordable social media monitoring tools available.
Get an in-depth look at your brand’s social media health via Keyhole’s social dashboard feature.
You’ll be able to view metrics including total impressions, total engagements, and total link clicks.
Other metrics that you’ll find useful include:
- Performance of keywords, URLs, topics, hashtags, and @mentions.
- Top influencers for your brand and information about their engagement rates, reach, and more.
- Info on global conversations, topics, and influencers driving your market.
- Sentiments around your brand.
- Campaign performance on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
- Brand or keyword mentions on news, blogs and forums.
Additionally, you can use Keyhole to compare your social media accounts and campaigns against those of major competitors.
Price: Custom
2. Sprout Social
Use Sprout Social to gather analytics from multiple social media accounts.
This tool allows you to quickly compare social media metrics across multiple networks at once from one place.
You can see analytics from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Once you have these metrics, you can quickly use them to create presentation-ready reports using templates and custom reporting options available.
This gives you multiple ways to not only conduct social media metric tracking but also be able to understand these metrics and present them to others.
Price: $249 — $499 per month
3. Brand24
According to Buffer, Brand24 is one of the best social media monitoring and analysis tools.
Brand24 is a comprehensive tool that gathers in real-time publicly available mentions on social media and from other online channels and analyzes them accurately.
All you need to do is set up a project on specific keywords related to your company, marketing campaign, or branded hashtags. Brand24 will work well in measuring the reach of a campaign, hashtag or really any topic related to your brand, industry, product category or competition. It also helps you check the resonance of opinions on your topic (whether they are positive, neutral or negative).
Additionally, you can reach out to opinion leaders and influencers, find out which online channels generate the most buzz, see who is talking about you the most, and get access to the 100 most popular hashtags.
Price: $39 – $249 per month
4. BuzzSumo
While BuzzSumo is not strictly a social media tool, it is a great tool to analyze your content engagement.
This awesome tool allows you to see how many times your blog post was shared on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest.
Use BuzzSumo to also monitor the performance of content that contains relevant industry keywords.
This enables you to see how your content marketing campaigns are competing against the competition.
With this tool, you are able to tell which types of posts receive the most engagement and use this data to inform your own content strategy.
Price: $99 – $299 per month
5. BrandWatch
Want to know what your customers are thinking? Use BrandWatch.
With BrandWatch, you can collect useful metrics from social media profiles, blogs, forums, and news/review sites.
BrandWatch will show you the volume of your brand mentions. You can then compare it with that of several competitors.
Additionally, get to know what your customers think about your brand by observing their sentiments about your brand.
Plus, see your audience demographics and the topics they are most interested in.
Take advantage of the data visualization tool that lets you create engaging reports by representing data in the form of graphs.
Price: Starts at $108 per month
6. Google Analytics
You’re probably using Google Analytics to monitor your web traffic. But did you know that you can use it to monitor your most important social media metrics?
While this is not solely a social media analytics tool, it’s one of the best ways to track your social media campaigns.
It’s also one of the best tools to help you measure social ROI.
Price: Free
Final Thoughts
When it comes to tracking your social media metrics, consistency and preparation are important for effective measurement.
Select the metrics that align with your social media goals and start tracking them now. Track your metrics over time and observe how they change. Then apply this knowledge to improve your social media marketing tactics.
By measuring these social media metrics, you’ll be able to better understand how effective your social media activity is and what you need to improve on. On the other hand, using a tool like Keyhole will further level up your marketing game. It is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for top social media platforms.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What are the important social media metrics?
The important social media metrics are:
1. Number of social media followers
2. Impressions and reach
3. Engagement
4. Volume and sentiment
5. Top influencers
6. Response rate and time
7. Top engaging social media channels
8. Conversions
9. social channel revenue
How is social media success measured?
There are different KPIs and metrics to measure social media success, which depends on goals. If raising branding awareness is your goal for the quarter, then metrics like sentiment, volume, traffic, reach, impressions, share of voice, etc., should be tracked. On the other hand, if revenue boost is the primary goal, then metrics like CPC, CTR, reach, impressions, conversion, etc., are crucial.
What are the social media performance metrics?
Some of the top social media performance metrics are:
1. Reach and impression
2. CTR
3. CPC
4. Share of voice
5. Response rate
6. Engagement rate
