There are an abundant number of metrics in the social media marketingWhat is Social Media Marketing?Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a strategic approach that uses social media platforms to build a brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. It involves creating... world, some of them being reach, impressions, audience growth rate, engagement rate, video views, and CPC, to name a few. Pinpointing which ones are the most important for meeting your social media and business goals is key to every marketing strategy.
Your social media goals will determine the metrics you will measure. For every goal, you need a related metric. For example, if you want to overtake your largest competitor’s follower base, you need to pay attention and measure your audience growth rate.
Every marketing director or client wants to see:
- Increase in traffic levels
- Increase in engagement levels
- Increase in the number of subscribers
- Increase in leads
- Increase in new customers
Your role as the social media manager is to contribute to the overall digital marketing, by driving organic social to meet business goals. To do this, you will need to focus on measuring the following metrics:
Engagement
Engagement is the number of likes, comments, shares, and clicks you obtain for each social media post. Measuring this metric is key to understanding whether your post is resonating with your audience. Viewing how much engagement you have received, will help you to identify how well your social media marketing campaign is performing. High engagement rates show the content you are distributing to your audience appeals to them. Engagement effectively shows which accounts are interacting with your content and how often.
Awareness
Awareness is the number of impressions and reaches for each post received. Impressions are often confused with reach; so, for clarity purposes, I’ll explain both terms:
Impressions are the total number of times a social media post was viewed. This can include multiple views from both followers and non-followers
Reach is the total number of unique views your social media post received from followers and non-followers.
Every organization wants to drive brand awareness, this metric is perfect for knowing whether you are reaching existing and new audiences. Tracking this metric alongside other metrics such as engagement, allows you to see the bigger picture. For example, if your post has high impressions but a low engagement rate, it means that your post was seen plenty of times, but it wasn’t resonating with your intended audience, which resulted in very little or zero engagement. However, if your post had a high reach count and a high engagement rate, it would likely mean that the content performed well and was shared on social media a lot by followers and non-followers alike, potentially even going viral.
Share of Voice
Historically share of voice was used to measure the success of advertising campaigns. Today, the share of voice metric is not only used to measure ad campaigns but also used in social media and public relations. Now, what exactly is share of voice? Hootsuite.com describes the share of voice as “a way of measuring your brand’s visibility compared to your competitors”.
Hootsuite further goes on to say, ‘It’s a great metric to focus on if you’re looking to increase brand awareness or sales.’. This is one metric that clients or marketing directors are enthusiastic to see improvements in, especially if they want to increase brand awareness and sales. Therefore, striving to improve your share of voice should be an ongoing goal for your marketing team.
Alongside the other metrics mentioned, make it a habit of monitoring your share of voice. Also, keep an eye on conversations mentioning your organization. There are various tools that allow you to measure your Share of Voice. Some of them include:
- Awario
- Brandwatch
- Social Searcher
Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR is an important metric to measure as it helps you to understand which content is getting the most clicks to your CTA. It also allows you to understand your customers better by identifying which content they are clicking on. To work out the Click-through rate, you would simply divide link clicks by post impressions and multiply by 100.
A low CTR percentage could mean that your copy, creative, or video isn’t resonating with your audience. On the other hand, if your CTR was high, it would mean your post received a high number of clicks, that directed them back to your intended landing page.
The click-through metric is also useful when you want to identify which content type performs better over another content type. For example, LinkedIn carousel posts always tend to perform better in terms of CTR than standard image posts.
When analyzing your social media feed, ask the following questions: which posts generated the most traffic to my website, which posts enabled me to receive the most leads on average, and which posts generated the most conversions (Sales, subscribers, etc). This will aid you to make informed decisions based on valuable data.
Audience Growth
Growing your social media audience isn’t as important as it used to be, with algorithm changes to social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram dramatically reducing social reach. This has impacted various metrics, the obvious one being fewer social media followers seeing your organic posts. Despite this, there are several benefits to growing your social media audience.
Growing your social media audience will enable you to:
- Create brand awareness
- Increase website traffic
- Generate leads
- Boost sales
- Opportunities to partner with credible influencers
Measuring your audience growth helps you to compare how well your brand is doing against competitors. When a brand has high engagement rates, they tend to have more social media followers than brands that have low engagement rates. When growing your audience, pay particular attention to social media networks that generate results and meet your organizational goals. And double down on growing your audience on these networks.
Conclusion
Measuring the above-mentioned metrics will determine if your social media strategy or marketing campaign was successful. These metrics tell your marketing director or client that you are indeed increasing brand awareness, engagement, leads, and meeting their social media objectives. It will also play a massive role in your strategic decision making, and enable you to enhance your marketing campaign or marketing efforts.
If you would like to take your social media presence to the next level, contact me or one of the Bora team to elevate your marketing.
