If you’re going to be spending time and money on your social media — which you absolutely should be — you want to be sure it’s working, right? But if you're a social novice, knowing what’s working and what’s not could be daunting.
And that’s totally fair.
Social media is an amazing brand awareness tool, a great customer service outlet, a sales platform and so much more. So you need it to be running smoothly. But how do you keep track of all that?
With social media metrics, that’s how.
What are social media metrics?
Here’s a quick definition: social media metrics are simple data points showing you how well (or poorly) your social media is performing.
Social media metrics can help you understand a wide range of things about your business’s content. There are metrics that tell you how many people are seeing and interacting with the content, or how much money you’re making via social.
As a little bit of an aside, if you’re building a social media strategy, defining social media metric benchmarks is crucial for measuring the strategy’s success.
Types of social media metrics
Unfortunately, there’s no single number that lets you know how well your social channels are doing. Because that would be too simple. And nothing’s ever simple — or is that just a me problem?
Anyways.
There are a wide range of metrics for you to keep an eye on if you’re posting regularly on social media. That sweeping range of metrics can be broken down into four major buckets.
Awareness metrics
Reach – Kicking the list off with a metric that’s super easy to define. Reach is the number of people who have seen your content. What’s nice about this metric is that you can see the ratio of followers vs. non-followers who’ve seen your posts.
A lot of non-followers seeing your content could mean a couple of things. It means your content is being shared, or the algorithm has decided to grace the content with its blessing. Or maybe both!
Impressions – Your content’s impressions will likely be higher than its reach. That’s because impressions count the number of times that your post has been seen, and one person can see the post more than once.
If your content is racking up the impressions, do a deep dive. See what’s resonating about that particular post. Can you replicate that social media magic? Find a way to fit similar content into your strategy going forward.
Audience growth rate – Audience growth rate is crucial for understanding just how much your following on each platform is growing by. To be honest, this metric is especially important for agencies like up to show how our services are helping grow your brand.
The first step in calculating your audience growth rate is choosing a certain period of time — we like to check it monthly. Then, take your new followers and divide it by your total followers, multiply that by 100, and you’ve got your Growth rate percentage.
Engagement metrics
Engagement rate – Shares, reactions, clicks, saves. These are all different types of engagements. And your engagement rate tells you (roughly) the percentage of followers who have interacted with your content.
We say roughly because not every engagement comes from a follower. And one follower could like, share and save a post you’ve shared. So, one way to calculate engagement rate — the method we at 1744 Marketing turn to — is divide the total number of engagements by total followers, multiply that by 100. Boom. Engagement rate percentage.
Amplification rate – The amplification rate is the rate at which your followers share your content. You could think of amplification as a subset of the engagement rate, one that only factors in shares. Having a dedicated, engaged following is the only way to grow your amplification rate.
So much so, we are now campaigning to change the name “amplification rate” to “our-followers-are-our-best-marketers rate.”
Virality rate – Viral, viral, viral. Everyone wants to go viral. Here’s a metric that tells you just how viral you’re posts are going. Virality rate is similar to amplification rate; they both factor shares into their equation. The difference is that virality rate divides the number of share by post’s total impressions, not followers.
Video metrics
Video views – If you’re not making videos, your social media strategy is in trouble. If you are making videos, you want people to see them right? Right. From YouTube to Instagram, every social network counts views a little differently, with some counting just a few seconds as a view.
That’s why video views are nice to look at. But far more important is the video completion rate.
Video completion rate – The name says it all right? This metric lets you know how often users are watching your videos to completion. Whether it’s a minute, five, or ten, you know you’re making quality content if people are sticking around all the way through.
Are all these metrics making your head spin?
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