Now that 75% of people use social media channels as product research tools, you need to reinforce your brand presence.
More so, each of these people spends 2 hours and 25 minutes of their time on these platforms every day. But, how many minutes of your audience’s time goes to you?
This is why you need to start tracking your social media engagement metrics.
In this guide, you’ll learn about social media engagement metrics, what it is and how to measure it. Let’s get started.
What are social media engagement metrics?
Social media engagement metrics (also known as social media engagement KPIs) are core metrics that measure the extent to which people interact with your content. It shows how much your audience is interested in your brand posts. This could be metrics like comments, shares, or likes.
Social media engagement is present for every platform. It looks like:
Why it’s important to track your social media engagements
Social media engagement KPIs tell you different things about your business. Here are three reasons why you should measure your engagement metrics.
1. Understanding your audience and their interests
It’s vital to track your social engagements to know whether your curated content and themes align with your audience’s interests.
More so, you get to analyze the formats in which you deliver content — what do they prefer? Videos, texts, or maybe, GIFs? It also gives you insights into the social platform that gets you the most results.
2. Ensuring you’re hitting brand goals
Social media marketing goes beyond posting for the sake of being active on LinkedIn or Instagram. It’s about using it as a tool to achieve your brand goals. It’s not strange that 77% of marketers say social media has been very effective for their business.
So measuring your engagement metrics allows you to know what goals you’re meeting and what you need to double up on.
3. Creating a better strategy
Tracking your social media engagement metrics to gain insights into what’s working and what’s not — what content or social channel is bringing in new leads, what content type performs better, and what topics excite your audience.
This allows you to make informed decisions about how to improve your social media strategy, content creation, and posting schedule.
Top 10 social media engagement metrics to track
It’s vital to identify the social media engagement KPIs you want to track. Here are the top 10 engagement metrics to watch out for:
- Likes: This refers to the number of likes or reactions a post gets. It lets you know that people resonate with your post.
- Comments: This is the number of people who shared their thoughts on your post. It shows that a post generates conversions, and thus gets more reach.
- Shares: This refers to the number of people who share a post. It’s also called share of voice and can increase your brand awareness.
- Saves: This refers to the number of people who keep a post for later. This shows that your content is valuable and relevant to your readers.
- Leads generated: This refers to the number of followers, sign-ups, or DMs that you got from your posts
- Video views: This is the number of times people watched a video. It shows how attention-grabbing your video is.
- Video completion rate: This is the percentage of people who finished watching a video. You can also note the “minutes viewed” metrics in its stead. It denotes how engaging your video is.
- Brand mentions: This is the number of times your brand was mentioned across social media
- Audience growth rate: This is the percentage of audience growth — how many new followers or connections you add on average.
- Link clicks: This refers to the number of times people click a link added to your social profile or post.
Now that you know the engagement metrics to track, let’s get into the steps to measure social media engagement for the brand.
How to measure social media engagement
Tracking your social media engagement allows you to know what’s working and what you can improve for better results. Let’s further break down the steps to measure customer engagement on social media
1. Set your goals
The first thing is to set SMART brand goals that you want to achieve through social media. It’s easier to create strategies and improve processes when you have a target.
For example, you want to:
- Add 100 new subscribers through your LinkedIn posts
- Increase LinkedIn traffic to your site by 20%
- Get 500 users to sign up to your app from social media in Q1.
Setting goals for your social media engagement allows you to develop strategies and content to achieve them.
2. Identify the engagement metrics you want to track
From the list of the top engagement metrics to track, choose the KPIs you want to track. These metrics should consider factors such as:
- What your goals are
- The social media platform you use
- The content format you share
For instance, if you share video content, metrics like views, video completion rate, and comments will be most important to you.
3. Use app-native analytic features
Some of these social media platforms have an in-app analytic dashboard. So, one way to measure your social media engagement is to take a look at the app insights. While this method is free, it is a manual and time-consuming procedure. However, it shows you want to know about your engagement rate insights.
Tracking your engagement metrics on Instagram
Go to your profile > Tap the 3 parallel strokes in the top right corner of your profile > Click Insights from the menu that pops.
It takes you to a page that looks like this:
Click “Accounts engaged” and it will take you to the engagement tab.
This shows your engaged audience and how they’ve interacted with your content.
For individual posts, you can just click “View insights” directly on the post.
Tracking your engagement rate on LinkedIn
On LinkedIn, you can check for cumulative or individual post insights.
Go to your profile > Click Analytics > Choose Engagements from the drop-down in green. If you’d rather check the performance of individual posts, click “View analytics.”
It will take you to a page that shows all social media metrics.
Tracking your engagement metrics on Twitter
Go to analytics.twitter.com and click “Turn analytics on.”
You get access to a dashboard with insights on how many tweet engagements you got within a particular period:
On a closer look at the “Engagements” section
It records your:
- Engagement rate
- Link clicks
- and other applicable engagement metrics
Tracking your engagement metrics on Facebook
You get an insights dashboard for pages and groups — not profiles. Go to your page > Click “See insights” under a post.
It takes you to a page where you’ll find relevant engagement metrics:
From here, you can also view the entire page insights. It shows you the following metrics:
- People reached
- Engagement
- Net followers
- Top content
- Audience data
4. Check Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool to measure social media engagement. It tracks the amount of traffic your site receives from specific social media channels.
But, there’s a need to add UTM parameters to your social media posts to get accurate results — if not, all social media traffic can be listed as “Direct.”.
UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) is a code snippet added as an extension to social media and content links for attribution purposes.
To see how much site traffic came from a social channel: Go to Acquisition > Social > Network Channels to view this data.
But with methods 3 and 4, you’ll have to manually collect your data into a social media engagement tracking spreadsheet.
It can be a rigorous process filling excel sheets and cross-checking not to mix up things.
This is what brings us to the final way to track social media engagement metrics. UTM parameters examples can be utilized to enhance your tracking accuracy.
5. Use a social media engagement tool
Using social media engagement tools like Keyhole to measure your post performance is an easier and more efficient way to go. It is the best way to measure social media engagement since you don’t need to set up tracking codes or worry about your metrics getting mixed up from manual reviews and reporting.
How to measure social media engagement using Keyhole
Keyhole is a social media analytics tool that gives you a comprehensive analysis of your engagement metrics in a user-friendly interface. You can schedule unlimited posts to multiple social media platforms and gather information about your best time to post, optimal post length, most engaging post types, etc.
It also scours more than just your social media pages to find this data. It analyzes websites and forums.
It shows you a graph of your posts against your engagement rate over time — so you can see and monitor when changes happen in your conversations with social audiences.
It gives you in-depth insights into how people are engaging with your brand on and off social media.
Why use Keyhole for social media engagement tracking?
Here are the benefits of using Keyhole to measure social media engagement:
- Keyhole gives you an all-encompassing report to help build your strategy
- You can utilize opportunities like tracking your brand hashtag engagements, not just posts
- You don’t need a UTM code to find websites mentioning and linking back to you
- You don’t have to open multiple tabs to manually track engagements in your social channels
- It saves time, and reduces stress and human errors since you don’t have to manually add numbers to a spreadsheet
- Keyhole offers you free 14-day access without credit card commitment to all these features to see if it’s right for you.
What is a good social media engagement rate?
Good engagement rate varies across different social media platforms. So, depending on the channel, a good social media engagement rate is anywhere from 1 to 6%, according to Adobe Express.
Here’s how you can calculate your social media engagement rate and know if you need to improve.
Final words: How to measure social media engagement
You need to be strategic to get the results you want, so start analyzing your posts. Measuring your social media engagement metrics allows you to see if you’re working towards achieving your brand goals.
From our guide above, you can start measuring your engagement rate on any social platform. But while these social platforms provide in-app analytics tools, it’s time-consuming and tiring doing using them to measure engagement.
Keyhole provides a more comprehensive analysis on a single dashboard so you can track your social media engagement metrics quickly.
About Author
Sally Ofuonyebi is a conversion copywriter for small businesses. She helps brands increase their visibilty, leads and conversions through connection-focused website and sales copywriting. Learn more at her website: www.sallyofuonyebi.com.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How is social media engagement success measured?
There are different ways to measure social media engagement. You can use the in-app analytic features, Google Analytics, and social media analytic tools like Keyhole.
What is a social media KPI example?
There are different social media KPIs like reach, shares, impressions, likes, and saves amongst others. However, the engagement-related KPIs include likes, comments, and shares as listed above.
What free tools can you use to measure social media engagement?
You can use social media in-app analytics tools and Google Analytics. Each social media app has a native analytics dashboard that allows you to measure your engagement rate, These tools are completely free to use.
