Essential Social Media Metrics You Should Be Watching Closely

Oct 2, 2020 | Digital Marketing Certificate

As you get your business up and running on social media, it is very easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data thrown at you. Every social media platform provides a variety of social media metrics that you can use to improve your business decisions. However, some metrics are easier to understand than others.

To simplify what data you are viewing, it is first important to understand your audience and your goals. Everyone joins social media for a different purpose, and you should be clear as to what your businesses’ goals are so you can maximize your investment of time and money into these tools.

This tutorial breaks down common social media metrics to help you get off the ground.

1. Volume

One of the most important metrics to measure is the volume of traffic social media is providing your business. In other words, what is the volume of the conversation the public is having about your business?

You want to be able to clearly understand how many people are talking about your business including messages, comments, re-tweets and more. These statistics can be found in various places, but should always be measured over time so you can gauge improvement. Facebook even provides a useful metric called “people talking about this”, which is designed for you to understand how many people are truly talking about your brand.

Learn about the peak performance of volume for your business including time of day, days of week, or different channels that provide the most overall volume. You can use this information to focus your posts more concisely and maximize your overall budget.

2. Reach

The next essential social media metric is “reach”, which is simply measuring the spread of a social media conversation. Reach is also a good measurement of potential audience size.

However, an audiences size is not a good metric alone. Reach can tell you a lot more about your business when compared to other engagement metrics such as clicks, retweets or replies.

Maybe the best way to think about Reach is to think that it will help to frame the other metrics for you to make smarter decisions about your social media investments.

3. Engagement

Maybe the most important of the metrics, engagement will tell you how many people are truly paying attention to your hard work on a platform. It can help you to understand how many people are participating in a conversation about the brand, as well as how well your content is being spread to others through sharing.

Almost every social media provides some way for people to share or reply to content. That is certainly useful engagement. But, engagement is even more important if you want to improve the interaction of your community. Engagement can lead to others seeing your content, which can lead to more engagement, which can lead to more seeing it…and this is when something truly goes viral.

Start watching what types of your content generates the best engagement (retweets, posts, comments, etc) and you may learn something you didn’t expect about how your community wants to engage with you.

4. Influence

Having a large audience does not mean you will have a large influence on social media. In fact, many social media metrics that measure Influence would ignore an audience size.

It is safe to assume that people who have had influence in an industry would be able to help you with influence in your business as well. You can connect with others on social media who have influence in your community and learn how to gain their followers from their mention or engagement with your content as well.

Influence is a social media metric that can be measured with a tool like PeerIndex, which will assign an influencer score to an individual and their ability to influence others.

5. Share of Voice

As a simple metric of marketing, you should compare your success against your competitors. The same is true on social media.

Since social media conversations are public, you can view social media metrics on your share of voice and compare this to your competition. Many interesting insights can be learned from tracking other people who are trying similar techniques as you, work in the same industry, or are using similar influence.

All of the social media metrics are important, but you also need to be consistent and prepare in advance for your content. This will help tremendously as you compare various metrics over time, platforms, and more.

By measuring, and closely watching your social media metrics, you’ll be able to understand what social media activity is helping your business the most, make smarter business decisions, and grow your business more than you ever thought possible.

To learn more about social media marketing, Digital Workshop Center offers stand-alone workshops as well as full digital marketing certifications. If you have specific questions you need help with for your business, Digital Workshop Center also offers custom, hourly consulting. Speak to a student advisor to learn more about your education options today.

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