What Are The Social Media Metrics You Need To Focus On?

From follower counts right down to post engagement percentages, the ever-changing world of social media metrics may be confusing to wade into. On top of that, a new and significant important metric seems to be established on a weekly basis.

As a social media professional, social media metrics are your chance to demonstrate the value of your work as well as the impact of the decisions you’ve made. If your boss asks you to ‘talk data’, take the opportunity to be a true pro and go beyond the shallow, “vanity” metrics—the likes, shares and retweets. Rather, focus on the data which matters — the numbers which prove that your effort has had a positive, bottom-line impact on the company.

The correct data will assure executives that their investment in social media is paying off. It’ll also assist you with continuing to make smarter, more data-driven decisions moving forward.

Here are some of the social media metrics that you need to focus on in terms of reporting on social media performance.

Volume

The first – and simplest – social media metric that you need to measure is volume. Put in another way, what is the size of the conversation about your brand or – alternatively -your campaign?

Volume is a great first indicator of interest. People have the tendency to talk about things which they either love or hate, however they don’t often talk about things they simply don’t care about at all.

While volume could seem like a simple counting metric, there’s a lot more to it than merely counting tweets and wall posts. It’s important to evaluate the number of messages about your brand and the number of people who are talking about your brand. Track how both of those numbers differ over time.

Learn when volume is elevated – are there days or times when more individuals seem to be talking about your brand? You will then be able to use this information in order to focus more of your own posts throughout these times to get more engagement.

Reach

Reach measures the dissemination of a social media conversations. On its own, reach may assist you to understand the context for your content:

• How far is your content disseminating?
• How big is the audience for what you want to say?

Reach is a good measure of potential audience size. A large audience is good however reach alone does not tell you everything that you need to know. Reach turns out to be very powerful when compared to other engagement metrics. Make use of reach as the denominator in your social media measurement equations.

Select the important action or engagement numbers such as clicks, retweets, or replies. Divide them by reach in order to calculate an engagement percentage. Of all the possible audience for your campaign, how many individuals participated? Reach helps to contextualise other engagement metrics.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Are you keen on learning more about social media marketing? If you are then you should do our Social Media Marketing course. Read more about this course here.