SOCIAL MEDIA METRICS YOUR BUSINESS SHOULD BE MEASURING
The proliferation of social media has fundamentally changed the way that many companies do business. With the possible exception of television (a medium which is rapidly changing), there is seemingly no other platform that enables a business to reach such a large audience on such a regular basis.
If your business is not actively developing its social media presence, then you are likely falling behind your competition. This is especially true for consumer-oriented businesses, who need to build relationships with potential customers on a regular basis.
The first step to succeeding in the social media space is to establish your company on multiple different platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are among the most popular platforms for the world’s 2.77 billion social media users, but there are also several niche websites available as well.
Once you have begun a social media campaign, it will be crucial for your business to track its progress over time. While this may be obvious to some business owners, quantifying the impact of your social media efforts can often be quite difficult. If you don’t know how your company has been performing, it will be much more difficult for you to actually improve.
According to FullyAccountable, by focusing on a few select social media metrics, your business can quantify its digital marketing efforts and make adjustments as needed. In this article, we will discuss some of the most important metrics that are currently in use as well as the impact these metrics may have on your business.
Number of Likes, Paid Likes, and Organic Likes
When someone “likes” your business’ profile on social media, they will be able to see everything you post on a regular basis. Having a large number of profile likes is incredibly valuable—this means that people are going out of their way to have your company advertise to them. People can also like individual posts as a sign of support.
Likes (or followers, in the world of Twitter and Instagram) can be broken down into multiple different categories, including paid likes and organic likes. Paid likes come as a result of an ongoing social media campaign. Keeping track of this figure can help your business justify the cost of a given campaign. Organic likes, on the other hand, are generated entirely on your own. Social media is a numbers game; the more people you can get to eventually like or follow your company’s profile or posts, the more likely at least one of these people will convert into a long-term customer.
Total Number of Impressions
Monitoring your total number of impressions makes it possible to see how many people have been exposed to your content at all. This number can be accessed with various social media analytic tools and is essential for gauging your overall market presence.
Keeping track of impressions can help your business track it’s total reach and also track the effectiveness of each post. For example, if your business has thousands of impressions but has little to no interactions, you may need to adjust your overall approach.
One of the goals of social media is to get a large number of clicks, comments, and shares (retweets, favorites, etc.). These actions indicate that there was something about a specific post—of the potentially hundreds being viewed—that inspired the user to go out of their way and directly interact with your company.
Not all interactions will be good for your company. Things such as spam and negative feedback will increase your numbers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your company is doing anything better. Still, inspiring a large number of people to interact with your company is a step in the right direction. As your business gains momentum, you may want to shift funds from traditional marketing mediums to social media.
Engagement Rate Percentage
The “Engagement Rate Percentage” is a metric that compares your number of impressions to the number of people who have engaged in a post. Generally speaking, having a high engagement rate percentage suggests that your company is doing something right.
There are quite a few ways to improve this percentage and, consequently, have your social media efforts to be better reflected on your bottom-line. Responding directly to each client can help start a productive dialogue and also add utility to your comment section as a whole. This is why many accounting experts believe that the benefits of hiring a social media manager justify the costs.
Retention Rates and Completion Percentages (Video)
In addition to getting people to engage in your posts at all, you will also want to make sure that you are getting high-quality engagements. For example, if your company puts in the effort to create a 30-minute video about your products, your efforts will be lost if the vast majority of viewers abandon the video in the first 15 seconds.
Retention rates and completion percentages enable you to see how many people have actually viewed your videos to completion. This should have a direct impact on your video production strategy and whether creating these videos is financially justifiable. Because most people using social media spend a very short amount of time on each page, you may want to consider limiting the length of each video that you post. If you do have more information that you hope to share, you can direct any interested parties directly to your website.
Always keeping the finger on the pulse will inspire you to share insightful content on your socials.
Link Clicks
followers with your posts. Twitter’s unique character limit makes it very easy to offer a limited amount of information while also providing a gateway to more information elsewhere on the web. By including links in each of your tweets (or posts on Facebook and Instagram), you can herd your followers one step closer to converting into a sale.
Measuring link clicks will help you evaluate whether your posts are interesting and whether the links you are using draw people’s attention. Creating “click funnels” is an extremely common social media strategy that attempts to create conversions. If you had a difficult time getting people to click on your links, then you may want to consider using hyperlinks instead of messy URLs.
“How did you hear about us?”
In order to quantifiably evaluate your marketing strategies, it will be crucial to try and determine which mediums are actually generating sales. Asking your customers how they heard about your business can help you identify which media outlets have objectively been the most successful.
Most people will not respond to a simple questionnaire. Instead, your business should try to naturally pose these questions during the check-out process. Then, once the numbers have been run by your accountant and your marketing department, you will be able to create a strategy that is measurably more effective. Plus, you’re able to create a valuable custom audience with Facebook Ads Manager for an effective campaign.
Conclusion
Making an effort to quantify your social media actions will make it much easier for your business to see which strategies work and which strategies need improvement. By keeping a close eye on these metrics and adaptively making adjustments over time, your business will be able to leverage its social media presence to improve its bottom line.
