Important Social Media Metrics Small Business Owners Need To Track

November 4, 2020 1

Using social media to promote your business online is a necessity. But often, the digital sphere can be a little overwhelming, especially when you wade into it without determining what matters most to your business goals. It’s not okay to just assume that your business is doing well on social because of the increase in followers. You’re posting regularly and engaged with social media. But are you using it correctly?

This is why it is important to identify which social data is relevant to your business and analyse. When you track the right metrics, you will make sense of your business. The importance of knowing your target audience can’t be over-emphasized; it is not about increasing your followers without addressing whether or not those followers are in your target audience. That’s why you need to dig deeper to discover whether your social media presence is successful or not.

Important Social Media Metrics Small Business Owners Need To Track — Learn to track social media metrics for your business

What are social media metrics?

Social media metrics is the use of data to scale the impact of your social media activity on your business’s revenue. Your social media goals determine your metrics. If your business goal is to increase conversions, then, your social media goal would be to increase conversions from people that visit your site via posts.

With that goal in mind, your social media plan may include increasing conversions from social by 25% in three months. To meet this goal, you can decide to run a campaign that will consist of ads, product tags, and influencers. To measure this, you have to look at the social traffic and conversion rate metric from those posts in your website analytics.

Social media metrics are important and can help you to measure how successful your campaign is or how your social strategy is performing and how they ultimately have an impact on your overall business.

Five Important Social Media Metrics to Track

Reach

Reach is the potential unique viewers a post could have. If your business goal is to increase brand awareness, then you would have to focus on measuring your reach. This metric helps you gauge data on your audience growth rate. The growth rate of your audience depicts your social media momentum.

That’s because the reach of a post can often be global. Additionally, the reach metric can reveal what content is less valuable to your followers when you post at specific times, reach a large number of people and get little to no engagement. Reach can also reveal what type of content the platform’s algorithm values.

Engagement

Engagement shows the real impact of your content and what your audience thinks about it. However, this also translates to how a customer perceives your business even outside social.

Are you focused more on generating interaction (replies, comments) or on spreading a message (retweets and posts)? Then tracking engagements is important to you.

When a follower likes or favourites one of your posts, then they are acknowledging that it’s valuable to them. Knowing what percentage of your audience finds value in the things you post can help inform your content strategy and the part to follow.

There are two ways you can calculate your engagements:

· Engagement rate, which is the sum of all interactions with a post divided by the number of followers you had when the post went live.

· Engagement on reach, which is the sum of all interactions with a post divided by the reach of the post.

Acquisition

Acquisition refers to the channels that site visits come through to get to your site, or how your visits are acquired. Different acquisition channels include: organic, direct, referrals, paid search, email, social, display, e.t.c.

For social media, acquisition can be tracked from clicks to your website from posts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, or the built-in buttons in your platform’s profiles. With tools like google analytics, track website referral traffic from social media, and see what percentage of overall referrals come from social media, and determine the frequency rates of your visitors.

Conversions

Conversion is the number of visitors who, after clicking on a link in your post, take action on a page. If your website has a high conversion rate, it means your target audience finds your content compelling and valuable.

Conversions go beyond getting visitors to your business’ website and then getting them to return; it deals with having these visitors to convert into sales or any other desired action.

How to track it:
Create a post with a call-to-action link. Use a URL shortener to make it trackable.
Place a “cookie” on the user’s machine. Doing so attaches the lead to a campaign.
Use the campaign reporting to track the total number of clicks and conversions generated by the post.
Divide conversions by total clicks and multiply by 100 to get your conversion rate percentage.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of page visitors who click on a link in your post, only to quickly leave the page they land on without taking action. No matter how compelling you think your content is, you should know your audience attention span is pretty low. This is why you need to monitor the bounce and click-thru rates with great care on your business website.

Bounce rate lets you know your social media traffic and in turn the return on investment (ROI), and against other sources of traffic (like traffic from a Facebook post, traffic from an organic Google search). If your social media bounce rate is lower than that of other sources, it’s proof that your social media campaigns are targeting the right audience—and, in turn, driving high-value traffic.

Conclusion

There are many social media metrics you can track but it all depends on what aligns with your current business goals. Tracking metrics helps get a clue about successful or not your campaigns are, and how your social media strategy is faring.