10 Social Media Metrics You Must Not Ignore
Siddhant Minocha, Founder of Inclick, shares some of the most important and relevant social media metrics that can help you understand the audience better and draft strategies accordingly.
With the increasing use of social media for marketing purposes, the need for necessary monitoring and tracking tools is increasing. Every action that is taken on social media is for the sole purpose of getting attention. Whether it is in the form of increased engagement or creating awareness. Every brand today on social media has a marketing goal that it wants to meet. Hence, the need to build social media marketing strategies.
So here are 10 Social Media Metrics to help you build accurate and comprehensive social media reports, to base your future marketing strategies. With these metrics, you will be able to compile all the important information you need to understand the performance of your current strategies and formulate stronger strategies for the future.
Fans and Followers
Meaning?
The total number of people and pages that follow you or subscribe to your channel on a particular social media platform.
Benefit?
The more the number of fans and followers you have, the more you can spread the word about your product or service. People that like what you do and would like to see more of what you do, follow your profile. Putting the number of followers in your report can help you to define the growth in your audience over a particular duration. The number of followers you have, the more people like to hear from you and the more you can spread the word around.
Calculation?
Social Media Platforms provides with the number of followers you have on your profile. If you look at the Insights, you can see if how many followers you gained.
Posts Published
Meaning?
The frequency at which posts are being published by the brand.
Benefit?
It can help you to keep a track of the number of posts a brand publishes per day or per week, to keep your audience entertained and engaged. There can sometimes be a direct link between the frequency of posts and the consistency in the number of followers. Data has proven that inconsistent social media appearance is a major factor in the loss of total number of followers and engagement rate. Using Page Posts as a metric in your social media report can help you to analyze your performance. Not just that, by keeping a track of what your competitor is publishing, you can understand what is it that is keeping their audience engaged. You can study this data and learn everything you can to formulate your future strategies. This is a comprehensive metric to put down in your social media report as it can help you to analyze your own and your competitors’ posts from multiple angles.
Calculation?
On the Insights tab, you can see the number of posts that are being published in a particular duration.
Note: The data that we are talking about here to use in your social media reports can be accessed with the use of specialized social media reporting tools (Inclick Track, Snaplytics, Sprout Social – amongst others) designed specifically for the task.
Content Analysis
Meaning?
Content Analysis tells you the details about what kind of content gets more engagement than others.
Benefit?
The best part about social media is the freedom to experiment. With the ability to analyze your published content on multiple points, you can highlight your better-performing content and focus your energy into building the kind of content that your audiences like to see. By putting this metric in your reports, you and your team can keep experimenting and filtering out the most successful content style and use them to strategize your future social media marketing moves.
Calculation?
To do a content analysis, you need to write down the types of posts you’re doing and the engagement posts have received against it. For eg., if you’re making a Facebook report, you can see engagement on different post types like Photo, Video, and Status but f you’re making an Instagram report the most type will change to Image, Video, or Carousel.
Organic vs Inorganic Interactions
Meaning?
The engagement you receive could be either paid or unpaid.
Benefit?
Talking about organic and inorganic in your social media report can help you to understand if the content that you are creating is getting enough engagement as it is, or if it needs a little boost to reach more audience. It might be the case sometimes that the content you created could not get an optimum level of interaction even after that extra boost. In which case, you need to find relevant data to analyze your performance and get to the root cause of the problem.
Calculation?
To calculate Organic and Inorganic interactions, you need to keep a track whether the post is promoted or not.
Page Reach & Page Impressions
Meaning?
How many distinct people were reached is the reach whereas Impressions are the number of times your content entered someone’s screen.
Benefit?
By knowing your page’s reach and impression you can figure out how many people saw your content through paid and unpaid efforts. This is a page-centric metric which talks about the activity on a particular page in a particular duration. The higher the reach, the higher are the chances of creating brand awareness amongst your prospects.
Calculation?
Reach & Impressions are provided by the network’s internal tool for eg. Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics.
Posts Engagement: (Post Activity + Clicks + Video Views (Views more than 3 seconds))
Meaning?
The combined activity around a post including clicks, likes, comments, video views, and shares is post engagement.
Benefit?
An increasing post engagement leads to an increasing brand awareness which eventually leads to an increasing sales of your product or service. This a post-centric metric to learn about unlike page reach and page Impression.
Calculation?
To derive Post Engagement, you need to add network-specific metrics. For Facebook, a good starting point is (Likes + Comments + Shares ) + ( Post Clicks ) + (Video Views ). For Instagram it could be: (Likes + Comments) + (Video Views) + ( Replies + Saves) + (Profile Visits )
Page Engaged Users Rate
Meaning?
The number of people who engaged with your page in a particular duration in respect to its reach or followers.
Benefit?
By calculating the page engaged user rate, you can simplify your engagement numbers, that are usually multiple thousands and sometimes millions to an understandable and easy to work with rate. You can use this number to compare your weekly or monthly performance with yourself or your competitor. In the case of your competitor, the factor used for calculation is the number of followers. Whereas, to know your brands’ engaged users rate you use that particular durations reach for calculation.
Calculation?
Calculating Engagement Rate is easy. To derive engagement rate, you have to divide “Total Engagement” with “Reach” and multiply by 100.
Page Posts Engagement Rate
Meaning?
Number of engagement on posts posted on a page in a specific duration in reference to the number of people reached in that duration. It is a very post-centric metric to calculate, unlike Page Engaged User Rate which is calculated in respect to the page’s engagement.
Benefit?
If you can pinpoint which posts have the most engagement in a particular duration, you can figure out the trends and shortlist what your audience finds the most engaging. Adding this to your Social Media Report can help you to discuss the most engaging and trending posts while building your social media marketing strategy for the next quarter.
Calculation?
Page Post’s Engagement / Page posts Reach X 100
Video Views
Meaning?
The number of views on the video for a (particular) minimum duration is counted as a video view. For example, On Facebook, Twitter and Instagram the video should be viewed for at least 3 seconds to be counted as a view. On YouTube, however, the minimum duration is 30 seconds.
Benefit?
3 seconds might sound like nothing but when it comes to a video, 3 seconds is long enough for a person to decide between watching or switching. Similarly, a brand can set grounds in 3 seconds to attract their viewer into watching the entire video. Video views can help you to understand if your prospects like what you are saying. If they are able to connect with your brand and its beliefs. The lack of video views could broadly mean two things, (1) the video is not telling an interesting story. (2) the way the story is being told does not resonate with your viewer. It’s not just about having engaging content; it is more about having relevant engaging content.
Calculation?
Video Views are provided by the Facebook Inisights, Twitter Analytics, Instagram Insights, and YouTube Analytics.
Audience Demographic
Meaning?
Understanding your audience better by categorizing them into multiple categories like age, gender, location, etc.
Benefit?
Every product or service that is offered by a brand is focused towards a particular niche of audience. Be it kids, be it, elderly people or middle-aged men. With this social media metric you can figure out if the people that are most engaged in your social media publications are the ones that you intended it for, or is it different? Having the data about your prospect audience can help you to bridge the difference between expectation and reality and build a marketing strategy that best helps build your brand amongst your prospects.
Calculation?
Audience split is provided by the network’s analytics portal. If a brand can build its social media marketing strategies based on accurate analytical data, then the chances are that every strategy build will meet its goal. Having accurate and comprehensive data to build your social media report regularly can help you keep track of not only your actions but also your competitors. It can also give you the insights you need to find and reach your prospects.