Social media is one of the most valuable tools for business. The beauty of having a business is that you are able to measure EVERYTHING online. When you do have access to thousands of these metrics, it’s hard to figure out which ones are more important than others.
The easiest way for tracking metrics is to look at the overall social funnel. You want to be able to get your audience to view content at the time when YOU want them to view it. The key idea behind these metrics is to start broad and then really focus on the ones that will get you to your ultimate goal. So, in order to get to that goal, you want to be able to set your benchmark and track and measure these social media efforts, right? We’re here to help you with that!
Here’s a breakdown of all of the social media metrics that we recommend you should start tracking for your organic content and paid campaigns:
1. Brand Awareness – This is an overall measurement of the attention that your brand is getting across your social media platforms during a specific period of time. For example, on Facebook, you can create a brand awareness ad campaign to showcase your business to the people who are most likely going to be interested in it. Through brand awareness, you are able to reach a certain audience demographic and use them to engage with your product over time.
2. Engagement – This is the best and most important way to measure how people are speaking about your brand. Engagement is a sum of the number of likes, comments, shares, link clicks, and video views you are getting on your content. People who are actively engaging with your content (your middle funnel audience) are essentially interested in what you have to offer and would be active to click through to your website.
3. Clicks – In order for your audience to take action on your website, you want them to be able to click through your existing content. This is why it’s so important to have great content, so that your audience will be more curious to know what you have to offer. The more often people click to get to your website, the more chances you have of generating more conversions and leads.
4. Click-Through-Rate (CTR) – This measurement shows how often people click on the call-to-action link in your content. You can have a lot of likes and comments on your content, but in the end, you want your audience to regularly click-through to your website. The higher the CTR, the more traffic you will get on your website.
5. Cost-Per-Click (CPC) – If you are running ad campaigns, you can measure your cost-per-click by the amount you have spent on your campaign divided by the number of clicks. You want to keep this number as low as possible, most anything under $1. People generally ignore this metric and focus more on the amount that they are spending. CPC is actually more important because it will show how much value you are getting out of the amount that you’re spending.
6. Bounce Rate – This is the percentage of page visitors who click on a link in your post, only to quickly leave the page they land on without taking an action. Your ideal goal should be to have enough pages on your website and a great menu so that your audience can navigate through instead of staying on that one page that they click to. The lower the bounce rate, the better, as you want to be able to drive high-value traffic to your website to get more valuable conversions while your users ‘bounce’ from one page to another.
7. Conversions – These are the number of people who, after clicking to your website, take an action on your page/pages. These actions can vary from a purchase to subscribing to an interest list/newsletter, etc. Your conversion is essentially whatever goal you want to set for your business. I cannot stress enough how important this metric is, as it is the final step in your social media funnel! The more conversions you have, the easier it is to know whether or not your content is captivating enough to your audience.
So now that we have gone through our top metrics, you as a business owner should be able to track valuable things that impact your brand/business the most. In the end, you want to be able to see whether or not the money and time that you are investing is paying off.
People always assume that the number of followers you have or the number of likes you have really defines your business. Don’t get me wrong, these are important for your brand, but if these people are not actually engaging with your content or converting with your content, then it won’t matter in terms of your long-term goal. If you focus on these vanity metrics, you won’t be able to see the real data that will have a huge impact on your brand. You want to dig as deep as possible to find these metrics, because that time and effort will be worth it in the end.
If you want your brand to be noticed, then make sure to leave a great ‘impression’! (Pun intended) ?
