Social media metrics are great tools for social media managers. The numbers tell the stories of how your social media account connects with the viewers and followers. From increasing the number of likes, comments, shares to building more of a community on social media, social media managers use metrics to help uncover the meaning behind those numbers and achieve the brand’s goals.
Engagement metrics help uncover the reason behind your audience’s tendency to interact with your account and how often. Likes, comments, retweets and shares are simple engagement metrics that add up to paint the picture of how your audience engages with your individual posts. The post engagement rate is the number of engagements divided by impressions or reach; a high rate means many people find the content interesting. Account mentions occur when someone tags your account in an organic way and not from a post. These metrics indicate the account has a well-received brand awareness (Chen, Sprout).
In addition to looking at individual metrics, you also should look at a combination of metrics can help you achieve goal or build a strategy. Impressions, reach and share of voice are other metrics social media managers can use to analyze their account’s performance. Different metrics will mean more to different businesses or brands. Some metrics might not be as helpful to some brands as they are to others (Hughes, 2015).
Who is my audience?
When asking this question, social media managers need to know who their audience is so that they can create content specifically for their audience. If your audience is primarily young, females who enjoy fitness, then you wouldn’t post content that appeals to an older generation interested in tips for investing in the stock market. Twitter analytics has an audience tab that lets social media managers find out more about their current audience. In the analytics audience tab, you can view interests, buying styles, incomes and net worth. This can in turn help you grow your audience even more by posting content geared towards the audience you already have. (You would hope that the audience you already have would share or repost your content and share with their other followers who also would be interested in your content.) (Griffin, 2016).
Am I doing better than my competitors?
Facebook has an interesting analytics feature that allows you to track other accounts that you may be in competition with. The social media giant will show engagement performances for numerous other pages. For social media managers, it is important to look at your competition to see how they are doing on social. This helps you create benchmarks and goals to beat for your business’ or brands performance. Browsing the content of other social media pages can also help with inspiration and keeps you up-to-date with other things go on in your industry.
What are people saying about my brand?
Comments are a great way for social media managers to engage with their customers and followers, and it helps to see what people are saying about your business. Customers leave comments on posts for a variety of reasons; sometimes, they can be positive reactions praising the company, or other times, customers may be reacting to a post with negative reactions. Either way, analyzing and responding to comments can help the social media team grow and evolve because they are seeing direct reactions to posts from followers.
When is the best time to publish?
When looking at timing for publishing posts, the easiest metric to look at comes from the likes, retweets, comments and shares. The more likes, retweets, comments and/or shares, the better your post did with your audience. In addition, it is helpful to analyze more than one post to see if you can find trends on when the best time to publish a post is. Sometimes, businesses or brands find that morning posts do well because their audience checks their phones when they wake up. On the other hand, sometimes social media managers find that posts published later at night do better because everyone is on their phone at that time, too.
What content does my audience enjoy the most?
From video content to written content on a blog, the numerous ways businesses and brands can share their stories is endless. But, there are certain types of content that appeal to audiences in different ways. One audience may prefer photos and videos to links to written content. In similar cases of finding the best timing for your posts, you have to look at the engagement numbers and the likes, shares, retweets and views on the content you post to see if it does better in different formats. Nowadays, younger audiences usually don’t want to sit down and read a longer, written pieces, but rather watch quick videos like Tik Toks.
Which social media network is the best for my brand?
With so many different social media networks out there, sometimes it is best to stick with one platform to share content. For influencers who rely on photography to tell their stories, Instagram is probably the better choice rather than using Twitter. To find out which platform is better for your business or brand, you can use various analytics to see the difference in engagements, likes, shares, retweets and comments across the different platforms. If your content is doing increasingly better on Instagram than Twitter, it doesn’t mean you have to only post on Instagram, but you could look into posting more on Instagram, as your audience is more present and engaged on that platform.
How can I have a better performance on social media?
Using analytics and researching what other brands or businesses like yours are doing on social media can help build your brand up. It won’t happen overnight, but discovering what works for your brand and business and executing that strategy will help create a community of followers. In addition, if you find a strategy is working for you, keep it going and expand to keep growing in how you connect with your audience.
I also believe great photography is the best way to get a clean and unified look for your brand or business on every social media platform.
References
Chen, J. The most important social media metrics to track. Sprout Social. Retrieved from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-metrics/
Griffin, J. (16 November 2016). How to track social media metrics on four social networks. Social Media Examiner. Retrieved from https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-track-social-media-metrics-on-four-social-networks/
Hughes, B. (29 April 2015). Which social media metrics actually matter? Business.com. Retrieved from https://www.business.com/articles/which-social-media-metrics-actually-matter/
MAGGIE PRUITT 