Even though algorithms, reach, and prices are constantly changing, social media managers still need to keep track of metrics.
First, let me ask you a few questions:
- What is the value of social media marketing?
- How do you assess your own performance?
- How to effectively measure social traffic and revenue generated by social channels?
While social media can be a valuable tool for promoting your business, it’s important to remember that success is measured by more than just numbers of followers and engagement rates. You need to be able to show how social media is positively impacting your bottom line.
No, and that’s where our concerns begin. You need to be able to measure the performance of your social media channels.
Social media metrics can help you rescue your key social media problems!
Social Media Metrics
Social media metrics are performance indicators that can be pulled from your social accounts.
There are some metrics that can be applied to all social platforms, and there are other metrics that are specific to just one social platform.
There are metrics that can help you build a successful online presence, increase brand awareness, or develop successful marketing campaigns.
This is why you will not find any vain metrics in this post. A growing follower count looks good on paper, but it is not necessarily an indicator of a healthy social media presence, especially in the age of bots.
The mystery SM metrics are the ones that will give you the most insights into your social media marketing strategy and set you ahead of your competitors.
Each social platform has statistics that show data related to:
- Followers
- Clicks
- Traffic
- Engagement
- Conversions
As you know, you can use social channels to achieve different results. You can implement a strategy that will:
- Increase your brand awareness
- Increase the number of your brand mentions
- Improve your customer service levels
- Boost your conversions
- Help you reach your target audience
- Expand your social share of voice
The goal of this social media is to have a slightly different set of metrics. You can find metrics you can easily track.
Key Social Media Metrics You Should Track:
1. Volume of Mentions
Mention volume is a good indicator of how interesting and engaging your content is. Checking mention volume will give you a sense of how often people talk about your brand.
You can measure the volume of mentions from social channels over time to see if there are any seasonal changes in interest. This could help you reach potential customers more easily and deliver better results at a certain time of year.
There is a possibility that the demand for your product will increase throughout the year.
There is typically a spike in interest around Black Friday in November and in late October in the SaaS industry.
The volume of mentions metric suggests that we should invest more in promotion a month before Black Friday, when potential customers are likely to be conducting research around the tools they would like to buy.
2. Reach
Make sure you’re monitoring your reach metric if you’re running a social media campaign.
You can use social media reach to see how many people have seen posts on your social channels and how the content is spreading across social networks.
Additionally, the number of people who see your message (reach) determines how large your desired audience is. It’s safe to assume that followers are interested in your message and, possibly, product.
The higher your product is placed, the bigger the audience that will see it. From a technical point of view, measuring this parameter is easy.
The only things you need to do are create a dedicated hashtag and set up a social media monitoring project using that hashtag as a keyword.
There are two metrics associated with brand awareness: the volume of mentions and reach.
Having a recognizable brand will help you be seen as a leader in your industry. Customers will be more likely to trust a familiar brand, and you’ll be able to reach new markets.
3. Sentiment
The number of times a particular subject is mentioned is the metric you will use to base your social media analysis on.
Other metrics will give you the information you need to make the best decisions.
First thing on the table – sentiment.
Sentiment will tell you whether people are generally positive, negative, or neutral when they talk about your brand. This social media metric can be especially useful when you’re running ad campaigns.
At first, a large number of mentions might make it seem like the campaign is going well. After all, people are talking about your brand.
But that’s not the whole picture.
A lot of people talking about something with mostly negative sentiment is a sign that a social media crisis is coming, and you need to start using your crisis management plan.
4. Engagement Rate
You need to make sure your content is interesting enough to make people want to discuss it and leave some sort of reaction. That’s where engagement metrics come in handy. This is one of the most important social media metrics you should track.
The algorithms that determine which content to show first on a timeline consider the number and type of interactions on your social media account. So, likes, clicks, shares, and comments are essential for a broad reach.
In other words, if your posts have more comments, likes, and shares, more people will see your content, and you’ll have more exposure.
Therefore, numbers and types of interactions are some of the most powerful social media metrics. The engagement rate will show you how interesting your posts are.
Monitoring brand mentions and interacting with customers and followers is a great way to build a community and improve customer satisfaction.
Sentiment is how your customers feel about your service, while engagement is how involved they are with your service. By improving these two metrics, you can deliver better customer service to your clients.
This can help you get an insight into what they are saying about your brand. You can use social channels to openly talk to your clients and get an insight into what they are saying about your brand.
If you can identify any issues that your customers regularly encounter, it is a valuable opportunity to resolve those issues and turn your customers into brand ambassadors.
You can improve your social interactions and customer satisfaction by reducing the average response time.
5. Influencers
People who work in social media marketing tend to have strong feelings one way or the other about influencer marketing. The increase in negative comments is due mostly to not doing enough research and making decisions based on inaccurate information.
The right influencer can affect your sales levels. It is crucial to choose the right public persona to work with for a successful social media marketing campaign.
When choosing social media metrics, it is important to select ones that will help you identify the best person to work with.
A tool that monitors social media can identify the most influential people talking about your brand or industry, and compile a list of them.
To be successful in influencer marketing, it is important to consider both the influencer score and sentiment analysis. This will help ensure that you are working with someone who does not generate a lot of negative feelings.
The percentage of times a brand is mentioned, relative to other brands within the same category, is known as share of voice. This metric is often used to identify brand advocates, or people with a high level of influence.
If your marketing strategy includes influencer marketing, it’s important to closely examine the share of voice metric, as it can be a good indicator of influence.
An influencer campaign is one of the most effective ways to use social media, particularly if your key performance indicator is engagement.
An influencer can help promote your product or service by adding social credibility to it. An influencer can act as a digital marketing evangelist and help spread the word about your brand.
6. The Share of Voice
The percentage of a social media user or page’s contribution to a discussion indicates how much of the discussion was generated by the user or page.
You can improve your company’s online presence by monitoring how often people are talking about it and analyzing their sentiment. This will give you insights into which channels are performing well and what people are saying about your company.
The Share of Voice is the most important part of your social media analysis.
How influential is your own profile? If you post something, will your followers discuss it?
The share of voice metric can help you see how much of the conversation around your industry is focused on your brand. This can help you determine if you’re perceived as the industry leader.
7. Virality Rate
The virality rate is a measure of how often your content is shared, expressed as a percentage of total impressions. This is in contrast to the amplification rate, which is a measure of how often your content is shared, expressed as a percentage of your total followers.
A content’s virality rate measures how many fresh impressions it gets each time it’s shared. So if someone shares your content with their audience, it gets a fresh set of impressions.
The virality rate is the number of shares a post has divided by its impressions, multiplied by 100 to get the percentage.
8. Customer Satisfaction
Customer service metrics are not just about response times and response rates. CSAT (customer satisfaction score) is a metric that measures how happy people are with your product or service.
The CSAT score is based on the question of how satisfied the customer is. In this case it is used to measure customer satisfaction with social customer service.
Would you be interested in taking a survey to rate your satisfaction with our customer service?
To find your CSAT score, first add up all the responses from your survey. Then, divide this number by the total number of questions on the survey. Finally, multiply by 100 to get your CSAT score as a percentage.
9. Net Promoter Score
A metric measuring customer loyalty, Net Promoter Score is based on the question, “How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?”
Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who keep buying and referring; passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who can be wooed by the competition; and detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.
Whereas CSAT only looks at customer satisfaction in the present, NPS tries to discern how likely customers are to maintain a relationship with a company in the future. NPS is determined by surveying customers and asking them how likely they would be to recommend a company’s products or services to a friend on a scale of 0 to 10.
Customers are asked to answer on a scale of zero to 10. Based on their response, each customer is grouped into one of three categories:
- Detractors: 0–6 score range
- Passives: 7–8 score range
- Promoters: 9–10 score range
The National Park Service (NPS) is unusual in that it not only assesses customer satisfaction but also gauges the likelihood of future sales. This makes it a highly useful metric for organizations of all shapes and sizes.
The NPS score is calculated by subtracting the number of detractors from the number of promoters.
Percentage of promoters minus percentage of detractors equals NPS. NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters and multiplying by 100.
10. Click-Through Rate
Click-through rate fills in the gap between the reach of your post and the engagement of your post. In other words, if 1,000 people saw your post, but only 10 clicked the link, your CTR would be 1%. How often people click a link in your post to access additional content is known as click-through rate, or CTR.
Your CTR gives insight into how effective your post is in engaging readers by providing additional content. For example, if your post is seen by 1,000 people but only 10 click the link, your CTR would be 1%.
The CTR (click-through rate) lets you know how many people saw your social media content and clicked on it to learn more. This is a good way to gauge how effective your social media content is in terms of promoting your product or service.
To calculate CTR, first divide the total number of clicks for a post by the total number of impressions. Then, multiply by 100 to get your CTR as a percentage.
Click-through rate benchmarks:
- Q1 2021: 1.1%
- Q2 2021: 1.1%
- Q3 2021: 1.2%
- Q4 2021: 1.2%
- Q1 2022: 1.1%
Paid social ads have a CTR of 0.05%, while organic content has a CTR of 0.03%. You should track the CTR for both types of content to get an accurate picture of your engagement. It is important to track the CTR for both paid social ads and organic content to get an accurate idea of your engagement. Paid social ads have a CTR of 0.05%, while organic content has a CTR of 0.03%.
11. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is a metric that measures how often your social content leads to a conversion event, such as a subscription, download, or sale. This is an important metric for social media marketing because it shows how valuable your social content is in terms of feeding your funnel.
If you want to be able to track how effective your social media marketing is, you need to use UTM parameters. Check out our blog post on how to use them to get the most out of your social media campaigns.
Conversion rate can be calculated by taking the number of conversions and dividing it by the number of clicks.
Conversion rate benchmarks:
- Grocery: 6.8%
- Pharmaceuticals: 6.8%
- Health & beauty: 3.9%
- Travel & hospitality: 3.9%
- Home goods & furnishings: 2.8%
- Consumer electronics: 1.4%
- Luxury: 1.1%
- Automotive: 0.7%
- B2B: 0.6%
- Telecoms: 0.5%
- Media: 0.4%
- Financial services: 0.2%
- Energy: 0.1%
The average conversion rate for ecommerce website is 2-3%. Two to three percent of website visitors typically make a purchase.
12. Cost-Per-Click
The amount you pay per individual click on a social ad is called cost-per-click, or CPC.
The lifetime value of a customer, or the average order value, will help you understand how much each customer is worth to your business.
The higher the lifetime value of a customer, the more you can afford to spend per click to get visitors to your website.
You do not need to calculate thecost per click. You can find this information in the analytics for the social media platform where you are running your advertisement.
Cost per click benchmarks:
- Q1 2021: $0.52
- Q2 2021: $0.60
- Q3 2021: $0.71
- Q4 2021: $0.70
- Q1 2022: $0.62
The below benchmarks come from search advertising rather than social ads, but the numbers give a good indication of how CPC is trending.
13. Cost Per Thousand Impressions
The cost you pay for every thousand impressions of your social media ad is called the cost per thousand impressions, or CPM.
CPM is all about views, not actions.
You don’t need to do any calculations, just import the data from your social media analytics.
CPM benchmarks:
- Q1 2021: $5.87
- Q2 2021: $7.21
- Q3 2021: $7.62
- Q4 2021: $8.86
- Q1 2022: $6.75
This metric allows you to compare the relative amount of chatter about each brand in order to gauge public opinion.
Mentions can be either:
- Direct (tagged—e.g., “@Hootsuite”)
- Indirect (untagged—e.g., “hootsuite”)
In other words, how well is your brand doing compared to others in the market?
To calculate your brand’s social media reach, add up every mention of your brand across all social media networks. Do the same for your competitors. Add both sets of mentions together to get a total number of mentions for your industry.
To calculate your brand’s share of voice (SSoV), divide the number of mentions of your brand by the total number of mentions in your industry, then multiply by 100.
Conclusion
To ensure success, it is important to focus on metrics that relate to your goals. This will help you to stay on track and achieve what you set out to do.
The only way to improve and report ROI is to track social media.
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