Maintaining a strong social media presence is essential in today’s business world. While it might seem simple to figure out how well you’re doing, there is more to it than just looking at how many likes and followers you have.
Likes, shares, and comments all contribute to social media success, but on their own, they don’t tell the full story. When we boil it down, there are three key areas to look at when we talk about social media metrics. In this article, we’re going to give you the rundown on all of them: what to look at, which numbers to pay attention to, and how to improve those numbers if they aren’t where they should be.
Engagement
Engagement is the holy grail of social media performance. It’s the one area that impacts the meaningfulness of all your social media metrics. Even if you have a lot of followers, it can still be possible to have low engagement, and low engagement indicates that you’re doing something wrong.
On the other hand, even if you have a small number of followers, high engagement with that audience will generate new leads. High engagement will also make your posts appear more often on newsfeeds in places like Twitter and Facebook which use algorithms to filter out content that hasn’t scored well with audiences.
Clicks are the first thing you should look at to measure engagement. A catchy, intriguing headline and an eye-catching photo will attract attention and make people click that link in your social post, which will take them to your website. If you aren’t getting a lot of clicks, you need to take a look at your content and figure out how to make it more engaging. Compare social posts with low engagement to those with high engagement for ideas, or try running your headlines through a headline analyzer to see how you could improve them.
Likes and shares also drive engagement up, but you should also look at how many comments your posts are getting. If your audience is engaged enough to start a conversation in response to your posts, then it’s likely you’ll see more success from your social media campaigns.
Reach
Your reach is an indication of how many people saw your post. The first way you would measure how far your reach extends is by looking at how many followers you have. Thankfully, this number is easily found on your profile page.
Another, more complicated metric for reach is impressions. An impression is when your post appears on someone’s feed and they have the chance to interact with it. This can be a little harder to measure, but you can try a social media analytics tool like Hootsuite.
Web traffic is the third big indicator of your reach, and it’s perhaps the most important. You need to know how much traffic to your website is coming from social media posts because you need that traffic to turn followers into paying customers. If your posts aren’t generating more web traffic, it’s a sign that you need to create better content that engages your audience.
Lead generation
Lead generation is what all these metrics boil down to. After all, generating new business is the whole reason you’re on social media. You need to know that your social media efforts are yielding a decent ROI, and for that, you need leads—the more, the better.
Determining whether social media has led to a conversion can be a little tricky, but thankfully Google Analytics has a type of report called an Assisted Conversion Report, which you can use to figure out where your leads are coming from. This handy feature will show where all your leads are coming from, whether it’s social media posts, online ads, or SEO content.
A lack of quality leads means that you’re not engaging your audience, or you could perhaps be on the wrong platform to reach the right kinds of people. On social media, a lot of your followers might just be people who are interested in your content but might not actually buying anything. Unfortunately, that’s not uncommon, but it’s still important to pay attention to which social media outlets provide the most leads and which ones aren’t as fruitful. Put your time and money into the ones that produce results.
Gaining traction on social media can be difficult, and it takes a lot of time and hard work to generate results. If you consider the metrics we talked about in this article when planning your social strategy then you’ll be on your way to generating loads of new business through the power of social media.