The 4 Most Valuable Social Media Metrics to track

You are on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and many other social sites. You want popularity and fame, but are you getting that? If not, then what should you be doing? Well, the right social media metrics hold the key!

Social media has emerged as one of the most critical channels for modern marketing, with 3.8 billion active users across the globe. It has become inescapable to such an extent where a person spends an average of 3 hours per day on social media. Looking at the recent figures, businesses have become active on social media. Moreover, stats found on the Internet suggest that 73% of marketers believe that their efforts are more effective on social media.

After looking at the recent figures, we know you are tempted to get started with social media. However, before you jump on to the social web, you need to figure out whether you are doing the right thing or not. And, to know everything is alright with your social media campaign, you have to track the right metrics.

You need social media monitoring consistently for social media metrics as it plays an important role in every business’ acquisition strategy. Also, social media analysis helps foster many important business decisions. Well, if you don’t know what social media metrics to track, then let’s have a look at its meaning.

Social Media Metrics – Overview

Digital marketers often gather data to observe various activities going on over social media. These activities could be about a specific brand, products, and services, events, recent offerings, or any company related topic. The objective is to understand customer behavior, audience interest, preference, and many more important factors that may lead a business to success. This use of data to gauge the impact of social media activities on business growth is called social media metrics.

When it comes to social media monitoring, it can be way confusing, right from tracking follower count to post engagement. You can’t do it manually and need assistance; otherwise, you run the risk of getting an anomaly in the final results. It’s better to take the help of several social media tools available online that will give you an accurate report on various social media metrics.

Well, let’s jump onto the critical social media metrics to assess what you are delivering to the audience. However, it would be better to take a look at the measurement opportunities at every stage of the social media funnel.

Measurement Opportunities to Keep in Mind

When we talk about the measurement opportunities in a new-age marketing funnel, let’s take a look at how the social media marketing funnel looks like:

The marketing cycle of social media depicts the most important factors that will help you measure your social media performance. These factors include:

• Activity
• Reach
• Conversion
• Engagement
• Acquisition
• Conversion
• Retention and Advocacy

In this article, we are going to talk about the metrics that revolve around these factors. It will ultimately help you in achieving your specific goals be it engagement, reach, customer loyalty, or retention. Let’s get started.

Four Social Media Metrics You Need to Track Right Now

Your social media investments are important and act as the major revenue drivers. You have to be careful while putting in your efforts and resources. It is always advised to know what you are actually getting out of your social media investment to shape your strategy further. This is the reason we are here with the 4 most important social media metrics that you should be tracking. It will help you assess the results you are getting out of your investment.

#1 Engagement

First things first – let’s talk about engagement.

Engagement is a larger category that encompasses several factors determining the audience interaction with your account. If you have multiple social media accounts, you will understand that you are driving some engagement from each account through various social media activities.

Here are the social media metrics/ user activities to track from the perspective of engagement:

● Clicks

No wonder – clicks are important from the perspective of engagement. They depict the quality of your content and how you pitch that to attract your audience. If you get low clicks, you can work with changing titles, captions, and visuals in your content. This is likely to make your work more engaging, which will get you better clicks.

● Likes

Another important social media metric is the number of likes. When you have more of them, it indicates that what you post is creative, unique, and engaging. If you have low likes on your posts, you should work on building authority because great content deserves a higher spot in search results.

● Shares

After likes, shares are prime social media metrics to understand the intensity of engagement. 54% of people browse social media for product research and if they share your content, it will work like recommendations for your brand. If your posts are shared on a large scale, it depicts that people are finding it useful, and your content resonates with their needs. You can track shares and retweets that depict the real engagement on your posts.

● Comments

Commenting on a social media platform is what people do consciously that sparks conversation. From this perspective, comments are a great social media metric to track. You can assess the impact that you are making on your followers regardless of the nature of comments, be it positive or negative.

Some other important parameters

● Brand Mentions

When talking about engagement, how can we forget tags and brand mentions? It depicts that your brand is in the eye of the audience, and they are talking about it. Brand mentions emphasize the relevance and indicate that you are successful at maintaining awareness on social media about your brand.

● Profile Visits

Profile visits are not as important as other metrics from the perspective of engagement through your social media handles. But, it does indicate that people are interested in what you do.

#2 Reach

If you are trying to create brand awareness and want massive fame, building a perception is important for which you need to track the reach of your message. By reach, we mean to say how many people have seen your social media posts. Here’s what you should consider tracking the reach:

● Followers

For followers, you need to track the time they are engaged with your content. If your customers are logged in and interact with your content within 30 days is an active follower. Also, make sure that you check the authenticity of your followers and understand who is fake or inactive most of the time. You will get people who are genuinely interested in your content.

● Traffic Data

Your social media traffic depicts the sheer hard work you had been putting in to grow your brand, which makes it an important social media metric to track. If you have low traffic, you should work on expanding the reach of your post. As you increase your reach, more people will see your content. If you have a good reach, it’s better to work on making your call to action more aggressive.

● Impressions

Impressions show how many times your post appeared on the timeline or newsfeed. Your post may appear because your customer followed your page or someone else from his/her network has shared or liked it. If you get a higher number of impressions, you can connect more and more people with your post in one go.

● Share of Voice

Share of Voice is also one of the crucial social media metrics that indicates the buzz around your brand depicting your successful attempt to evoke conversations. If you are not able to drive conversation, better look up to your competitors and explore unique ways of campaigning on social media.

#3 Conversion

With the rise of social selling, people are accustomed to the new wave of budding businesses on social media. You are also on social media to get some business out of it in terms of sales and revenue. If you are not tracking how much business are you getting out of it, then you will be in trouble later. Conversions are important to track to gain insights about your final ROI and how many customers you gained from social media. To track conversions, you can consider the below metrics:

● CPA

CPA stands for cost per action. If you are into paid social media marketing, this metric is useful for you to track the amount that you are paying to acquire a customer. Since it is for paid marketing campaigns on social media, your marketing effort and strategy, along with budget allocation will determine the results. You will get to know the poor performing social media channels, which you can discontinue if you aren’t getting enough business out of them.

Important things to analyze for CPA

1. Track direct sales conversions from a social media channel considering the last click.
2. Track the multiple visits on your social media handles, leading to the final sale for assisted conversions.

● Sales Revenue

The sales revenue is the most important social media metrics from the perspective of conversions to track. It reflects the number of customers who are actually buying a product or service through social media. Moreover, you better understand the value of each customer in the sales cycle.

● Non-Revenue Conversions

Now, all conversions are not focused on driving sales and profits. If your customers take a simple action to sign up for your newsletter through social media, it is also a type of conversion. Since it is not deriving sales, it is called a non-revenue conversion. You must track non-revenue conversions to understand what triggers your customer to take action.

#4 Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is one of the crucial social media metrics from the perspective of brand credibility, authority, and repeat purchases on the part of customers. You would be surprised to know that loyal customers spend 67% more than first-time customers. So, you cannot ignore such an important social media metric, if you want to expand your business on social media. Here’s what you can do to track customer loyalty:

● Prompt Action

When you are running a social media handle, you might have observed customer queries popping in the comments or DM section of the page. Your quick response to your customers’ query would help to establish a much-needed sound connection with your customers that is going to pay you in the long run. You should track the number of queries resolved on your part and in how much time?

You can use it as a great opportunity to make your customers realize that they have made a good decision by investing in your brand. Most of the customers expect a quick response. If you do so, it keeps your customers under the impression that you respect them and work on providing a solution to them.

● Customer Lifetime Value

Improving the lifetime value of your customer is also important from the perspective of assessing how successful you had been in gaining your customers’ trust. It also reflects your capability to keep hold of your customers for a long time. Strong relations and constant connectivity with the right people will ensure improvement in your customers’ lifetime value. It gives you a fair idea of your social media marketing strategy where customers are the focal point.

How Mentionlytics Can Help in Tracking Important Social Media Metrics?

Tracking the key social media metrics manually can be extremely challenging for budding businesses. Your time and efforts are valuable that you better save for more important tasks, which are crucial for your business. Considering today’s cut-throat competition and fast-paced time, it is best to invest in social media monitoring tools that can save time and are affordable. Mentionlytics is one of the best social listening tools that offer incredible benefits that will ultimately help you grow your brand on social media.

Let’s have a look at what Mentionlytics has to offer to your brand:

• You can collect important insights that will help you in better analysis
• As a user, you can discover current trends after analyzing the key social media metrics and, then strategize your campaign
• You can get easy access to mention insights to track engagement,
• It will help you grow your brand’s reputation and sales
• You can easily understand competition and gain insights about your competitors, products, and industry by keeping a close eye on their strategies
• As a marketer, you will get to discover different public perception at a time. You will know the current feelings of the public and what it has to say about your brand
• It gives you complete media coverage, including social media, online news, blogs, and any website.
• You can also join in forum discussions, comments, and blog posts to spread awareness about your brand. It will also let you know what people are talking about your brand

Get started with a free version here!