A Guide to Social Media Metrics
This week, I am taking a closer look at social media metrics. These are data points that show how well a social media strategy is performing. Social media metrics help us understand everything from how many people see our content to how much money we can earn from social media. These metrics are the building blocks for ongoing social media improvement and growth.
There are several different kinds of social media metrics. They all mean something a little different and are each used to measure different things. However, they all work together to give us a better understanding and insight into our social media performance, analytics, and strategies.
Rather than going through each of the social media metrics and explaining what they all mean, I am instead going to jump right in and go through a series of questions, and then determine the corresponding metric that would be best to measure each question. I will look at these scenarios from the perspective of a social media analyst.
Who is my audience?
Understanding your audience is important for any brand. Social media presents the opportunity to reach a larger audience that could branch out into different types of people based on demographics, psychographics, etc. While many different metrics can give you a good understanding of your audience, I believe the best metric to identify an audience would be engagement.
Social media engagement gives you an in-depth look at the number of likes, comments, shares, and messages that your posts receive. Platforms like Twitter have a specific area in their engagement view that is dedicated to measuring the audience that engages with posts (the Audiences tab). There, you can see a complete breakdown of your audiences based on their interests, buying style, household income, and net worth. Engagement on social media is one of the most important metrics for success. It can help you determine who out of your total followers are actually active followers.
Reach is another great metric used to determine how many people are seeing your content. While it’s not as specific as engagement, it gives a great overview of how much your content is being seen. It can be broken up by the distribution of paid versus organic content.
Am I doing better than my competitors?
Having brand awareness is so important. It’s also extremely important to try and stand out from the rest. To determine your brand’s success in relation to your competitors, it is crucial to understand the sentiment metric. This social media metric helps you to understand what people think about you and your brand’s image. Going back to Twitter as an example – the number of tweets favorited by other Twitter users will be a positive sentiment about a brand.
Social sentiment analysis uses natural language processing (NLP) to analyze online conversations. From there it can determine the meaning of deeper context as they apply to a specific topic, brand, or theme. Your net sentiment score will show how users feel about your brand and you can compare it with different competitors.
Another significant metric that could be used to understand your success versus your competition is the growth metric. The growth rate on social measures the speed at which your brand’s following increases on social media. Essentially, it’s how quickly you gain followers. If you have a high growth rate, it means your social media popularity, or “fame”, will increase. It’s good to measure your growth every month, six months, and annually. You can compare your own growth to the growth of your competitors to determine who is more successful.
What are people saying about my brand?
As we know, people talk! And with social media, word gets around even faster to an even wider scope of people. To get a gauge of what the buzz is around your brand, it’s important to look at the engagement and sentiment metrics. These will allow you to see what comments are being made as well as how many people are interacting with and sharing your content.
When is the best time to publish?
The context of your content is very important, but it’s also all about timing! It is very important to post at times of the day that get a lot of social media traffic. This can be different for every platform, so it’s crucial to understand what times/days work for each channel. To do this, you can use the engagement metric. If you can figure out what times of the day have the highest engagement rate, you can take this data into account going forward as you create and schedule new posts.
Which content does my audience enjoy the most?
Going back to the significance of the context of your content, I feel that the best way to measure the success of your content is using the content metric. This gives an idea of what content works best as well as how often new material is posted. Impressions are a great way to measure how often your content is displayed to your audience. Additionally, engagement is once again always a great way to get a solid understanding of what your audience enjoys most based on likes, comments, shares, and other interactions.
Which social media network is the best for my brand?
All social media platforms are a little bit different. I think the best way to understand which one(s) work best for you are to experiment with multiple networks. To start, you can use reach and impressions to see how many people are seeing your content and how often your content is being displayed. Taking these into account across platforms to determine which content has the highest reach and most impressions will be the key to narrowing down which platform(s) are most suitable for your brand.
How can I have a better performance on social media?
As I’ve said, all social media metrics work together to analyze your social media performance. I think the best way to perform better is to take a close look at all social media metrics: growth, reach, engagement, content, sentiment, and impressions. Analyzing them all individually and then determining how they all tie together is the best way to have optimal online performance.