The word metrics on its own is just a fancy word for measurement.In the case of social media, metrics refers to the data used to analyze the impact of a social media account on its audience. This means you can get an accurate measurement of how many people saw and interacted with your posts.
Why are social media metrics important?
Digital marketers often use special software to keep track of activity on their company’s social media platforms. By doing this companies are able to collect information about how their brand, product, service or any company related post is being perceived by people on social media.
Which social media metrics are important?
Deciding which metrics are the most useful can be tricky.To help get you started here are a few social media metrics that are very useful to all digital marketers.
- Volume
Volume is the easiest social media interaction to measure. It gives you an indication of how much interest there is in your brand by measuring the conversation size on any particular post.If people are talking about it they probably like it.
But it’s also important to measure and track how these numbers change over time. Has the number of messages and the amount of people talking about your brand changed? And if so, by how much? A lot of popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter offer free “insights” that tracks the number of people who are directly interacting with your posts.
This information can be used to improve future posts in order to boost engagement in the future.
- Reach
Reach refers quite literally to far your posts or conversation has spread across social media.If a particular post extends far beyond your follower count it will give you an idea of your potential audience size. Reach also gives you an indication about what content is popular among users. A post that’s been shared a lot is obviously striking the right chords with your audience.
- Engagement
Engagement is the most important aspect of social media. How well your audience interacts with your brand by commenting, liking and sharing your posts indicates the success or failure of a particular post. So it makes sense that engagement is considered to be one of the most important social media metrics.
Remember good content promotes engagement by spreading your message and generating interaction. If your content is interesting and fun people will be compelled to interact with and share it.
- Influence
When measuring influence it’s good to remember that audience size doesn’t necessarily relate to influence. It refers to who is talking about your brand and how much of an impact (influence) they have on their audience.
It can be difficult to measure but there are a variety of apps and software that can do so. Klout and PeerIndex are tools that give people an “influence score” which measures an individual’s potential ability to influence others.
Measuring potential influence can be useful if your brand decides to reach out to Social Media Influences for a particular marketing campaign.
- Share of Voice
Share of voice refers to how the conversation about your brand compares to the conversation about your competitors. This will give you a good understanding of how well you’re doing on social media.
Finding out what percentage of the online conversation in your niche market is focused on your brand compared to your competitors will give you an indication of your strengths and weaknesses with regard to social media.This way you’re able to evolve and keep your audience interested.
Final Thoughts…
Social media metrics gives you the ability to understand the scope of your impact and the effectiveness of your brand’s social media activity. This data can help you to create better content, reach more people and beat out the competition.