Social Media Metrics
What are social media metrics?
Social media metrics is the data used to assess the impact of social media activity on marketing campaigns and a company's revenue. These metrics help to assess how well you are accomplishing your goals in the social space and provide insight to where you can modify your campaign.
Why are social media metrics important?
Social media is an important part of any content marketing campaign. It is not just a soap box for you to broadcast your message to your followers, but a platform on which you can engage with those interested in your company and industry. Like any part of a content marketing strategy, it requires metrics so that you know how well you are accomplishing your goals.
Metrics in social media can tell you a considerable amount about your audience. You can learn the types of the content and the topics that they are most interested in, how well your efforts to build brand awareness are going and whether or not you are successful in encouraging these followers to enter your sales funnel. As you gain these insights, you will be able to modify your campaign as needed.
What are examples of social media metrics?
There are a number of different types of social media metrics you can use, depending upon the goals you want to accomplish on the platform. For example, shares, likes and followers are all good ways to see if you are successful with increasing brand awareness.
Comments on your social platforms or on the articles that you distribute through social media can help you understand how engaged your audience is with the types of material you are putting out.
How your backlink profile and traffic rates grow in response to social media distribution can also help you see how successful you are at engaging the search, social and content trifecta (link to search, social and content project piece).
- Volume measures how many people are talking about your brand and the number of posts that mention your brand. Track this metric over time to see how customer engagement changes.
- Reach measures the potential size of your audience. Use reach in comparison to other engagement metrics to discover how many people participated in your campaign in comparison to your audience.
- Engagement measures how many people participate conversations involving your brand. This can include sharing content and commenting on posts.
- Share of voice measures how you brand compares in conversions to your competitors.
How to build a data-centric social media campaign?
- Look over your past activity on the platform and see the topics and content types to which your social media audience most frequently responded.
- Develop a strategy that reflects a concrete goal for this campaign and ways to measure success.
- Understand that most social media followers are at the early stages of the buyer’s journey, so they are most interested in awareness stage and consideration stage type content.
- Create content that reflects understanding of why people share content.
- Distribute content and measure reactions through the predefined metrics.
- Make adjustments to improve your next campaign.
Social media is an excellent opportunity for you to engage with your audience personally and encourage them to enter your sales funnel. By using social media metrics during your campaigns, you will better understand people’s behavior and be able to create content more tailored to their needs.