Essential Social Media Metrics to Track for Business Success

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, leveraging the power of social media platforms is crucial to achieving your business goals.  

According to research by Hootsuite, if you actively track your social media metrics, you are 2.8x times more likely to achieve better marketing results. 

As a business owner navigating the world of social media, this is why you need to understand the impact of your posts and content and measure their success using relevant metrics. Metrics like engagement rate, awareness, return on investment, and reach and more. By monitoring such metrics, you can effectively assess the impact of your social media efforts and align them with your business goals for optimal results. 

In this article we will demystify the key social media metrics to track, ensuring your content resonates with your target audience. Let’s dive into the world of social media analytics and explore the metrics that truly matter in driving business success. 

Engagement: Building Meaningful Connections 

Engagement, the lifeblood of social media.  

It refers to the level of interaction your audience has with your content across social media platforms. This includes likes, comments, shares, and clicks. Tracking this metric allows you to see the effectiveness of your social media strategy in fostering meaningful connections with your target audience.  

For example, tracking the engagement rate on posts and comparing it will allow you to see your top performing posts. These are the posts that reach the most people and that people engage with the most.  

The reason why this is helpful is that you can identify what types of content your audience is resonating with most and create more of it. For us, we identified that posts that are more fun and casual tend to engage our audience on Instagram the most, so we started posting more fun type posts. See Digital Refinery’s Instagram for more.  

Top Tip: Make sure you aren’t “posting & ghosting”, you need to consistently engage with your audience on social media through multiple ways, including chats, comments and more.  

Awareness: Extending Your Brand’s Reach 

To expand your brand’s reach and visibility, tracking awareness metrics is essential. Things like impressions, reach, follower growth, and brand mentions. The number of impressions is the number of times your brand was seen or placed in front of people.  

Monitoring these metrics enables you to evaluate the effectiveness of your social media presence and its impact on raising awareness about your brand.  

This is important because without knowing how many people you reach; it can be difficult to increase your business’s customers. As you probably know, getting more sales tends to be kind of like a funnel, the more people see your brand and business, the more leads and conversions you will get. So ideally you want as many people as possible to see and engage with your business.  

To do this, you need to know which content type is best for expanding your brand’s reach, and by how much are you extending your brand’s reach, then you can adjust your strategy accordingly. Tracking your social media metrics is how you do this.  

By measuring the total number of people exposed to your content and the growth of your social media accounts followers, you can refine your strategy to reach a wider audience and increase brand recognition. Do this by seeing which posts get the best response aligned with your goals and then adapt. 

Return on Investment (ROI): Measuring Value Creation

Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your social media efforts is key to understanding the value your posts bring to your business and its goals.  

It involves analysing which platforms help make you the most money or generate the most visibility for your business (which should eventually translate to more conversions and more profit). You need to track and analyse the revenue generated, leads acquired, cost per acquisition, and the overall impact on your business’s bottom line.  

Doing this will help you understand where to spend your time and effort. For example, while we currently do three social media platforms, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, we have identified that the best ROI for us at the time of posting this article, comes from Instagram.  

Now, this doesn’t mean that we are abandoning the other two platforms and solely focusing on Instagram. It just means that we are focusing the majority of our efforts on Instagram while keeping Facebook and LinkedIn active. This allows us to go in-depth into strategy on one platform and still keep the other two active, allowing us to grow them into better ROI platforms later down the line. 

You can do this too. By leveraging social media analytics tools like Google Analytics and social monitoring tools like Brandwatch, or if you have the time by simply analysing your raw data from Facebook, you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, allocate resources wisely, and optimise your social media strategy for maximum ROI.  

Remember, tracking ROI ensures you’re investing your time and resources where they yield the greatest results, making you the most money. You might even find that social media isn’t the place you should be spending your efforts right now! 

Top Tip: Try to use tools like google analytics that can track multiple channels to make it easy for yourself. Else, in future you might find it difficult to manage multiple platforms tracking different things. 

Response Rate: Fostering Customer Engagement

While engagement metrics capture audience interactions, monitoring your response rate measures your or your team’s efficiency and effectiveness in engaging with your audience. A prompt and thoughtful response to comments, messages, and inquiries showcases your dedication to customer satisfaction and builds trust. Tracking your response rate provides insights into the quality of your customer interactions, allowing you to identify areas for improvement and enhance your customer service on social media platforms. 

You want to be replying to as many interactions on social media as you can, so monitoring this can help you identify where you might be letting things slip through the cracks. 

Measuring Social Media Metrics: Tools and Insights

To track your social media metrics effectively, we recommend you use tracking tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook, Sprout Social, or Hootsuite. Social media monitoring tools like these are essential for building up your monitoring and reporting system to track your conversion rates and measure real time data.  

They provide comprehensive data on key metrics, including engagement rate, reach, impressions, and more.  

By using these platforms, you can easily gain valuable insights into how effective your social media marketing efforts are, identify trends, adjust your strategies and make data-driven decisions.  

Tracking essential social media metrics is vital for business owners aiming to measure the effectiveness of their social media marketing efforts. By focusing on tracking where your social media is making an impact you can make your brand’s presence more effective and well known, gaining valuable insights into the impact of your social media strategies on your business goals.  

Remember, the effectiveness of your social media efforts lies in fostering meaningful connections, extending brand awareness, driving ROI, and providing exceptional customer engagement. Embrace the power of social media analytics tools. Adapt your approach based on insights and witness your social media strategy drive tangible business outcomes. Make your business more profitable today. 

Start by tracking these important social media metrics and measuring social media success and elevate your business to new heights in the digital world.