5 Social Media Metrics Your Business Needs to Track

Social media platforms have vastly grown in both popularity and in the number of active users. Social media networks aren’t only interesting to people but to businesses as well. The main reason many companies are establishing their online presence on social media is that social media provides numerous benefits to companies of various sizes. Not only are companies able to engage with their target audience, but they can also promote their products and services, as well as build awareness for their brand.

However, as beneficial as social media is, it’s still difficult to manage activity across platforms. That’s why many businesses are actively tracking various social media metrics, in order to gain insight into how their marketing efforts are performing and how their audience perceives them. By tracking relevant metrics, your company is able to determine the efficiency of its campaign as well as determine if the campaign needs some additional improvements. That being said, here are a few social media metrics your business needs to track.

Social following growth

The growth of your social following is indeed an important metric to track. The main reason this insight is useful is that it portrays at what pace your social followers are growing in numbers. It also represents how interesting your business pages and profiles are to people. Simply put, it shows how effective your efforts are at generating interest from your overall target audience.

In addition, it also means that the content you publish on your social media pages is able to ensure both your audience’s interest and engagement. Most social networks have already built in tracking tools for this metric, which means you won’t need any specialized software to help you track social following growth. For example, you can check out growth statistics on Facebook by checking the Insights tab on your page. It will show you the number of followers, reactions as well as the number of people who liked your page.

Engagement metric

Engagement metric is also crucial to track. It shows how engaged your audience members are and how, as well as when they take action on your pages. Engagement can include liking a post, sharing, commenting, clicking on a link and so on. This will give you valuable information about how your content marketing is performing on social media.

For instance, you can find out whether your content is interesting enough, if it is resonating well with your followers, if your content is encouraging followers to comment and so on. That way, you can easily improve your efforts if you see a decrease in engagement from your audience. Moreover, you can track the activity of your followers, which will allow you to determine the best time to post new content in order to maximize exposure. Facebook and Twitter both allow you to measure responses for your posts and tweets.

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Social mentions

Social mentions is another crucial metric your business need to track. The main reason this metric is important is that it allows you to monitor the overall opinion the general audience has about your brand. You can leverage social media monitoring tools to help you track conversations where your brand or company name is mentioned. You can also track how your company is being mentioned, such as whether in a positive, negative or neutral context.

This is very important, especially if you want to maintain a good reputation on social media as well as ensure your audience perceives your brand well. For example, if someone is unjustly posting negative reviews about your business, you can zoom in to that conversation and defend your company. Reputation can be very fragile on social media and if you’re not aware of what people are saying about your company, you can easily end up in a lot of trouble without even noticing.

Referral traffic

A lot of businesses leverage social media in order to generate potential leads. The purpose is to encourage leads to visit your website where they’ll most likely to convert. Now, the success of your social media strategies are based on referral traffic, i.e. how many leads you get from your social media channels and what those leads do once they land on your website.

You can use Google Analytics tools to measure incoming referral traffic from each social media platform you’re active on. If, for example, you’re not getting the desired number of leads from a specific social media network, it means you need to improve both your presence and your efforts there. Moreover, if your leads are bouncing off once they land on your website, it means your social media activities are bearing fruit, but it’s your website or landing pages that are the problem.

Social media ROI

Sooner or later, you’d want to see how your social media efforts are benefiting your business from a financial point of view. Every effort, campaign or promotion on social media costs money to produce. It’s only natural to expect some kind of ROI and your efforts to affect your bottom line. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to track social media ROI.

For instance, you can assign business goals and a dollar’s worth to every conversion point in your Analytics tool. Tie this metric to referral traffic and your top converting social media channels and you can determine the source of your conversions, as well as how much you gain from each conversion. As an example, let’s say that 3% of your Facebook followers convert to customers. If you know how much an average customer spends, you can calculate the ROI generated from Facebook alone.

When tracking social media metrics, many businesses oftentimes make a mistake of tracking vanity metrics instead of those that are truly important. The fact of the matter is that social media can offer a great advantage to your businesses but only if you plan out your strategies the right way. Therefore, measure only the metrics that matter and focus on how social media can help your business grow.