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Social media has quickly become a crucial element of successful digital marketing campaigns. Monitoring certain aspects of your social media accounts is critical to understanding your business’ successes. With so many social media management and analytics tools to choose from, it can be hard to know which metrics to track.
Social media platforms offer their own forms of analytics, meaning you shouldn’t need to pay for a subscription for any kind of software to get the basics; however, platforms like Instagram and Pinterest do require you to have a business account in order to access analytics data.
Below are some basic but essential metrics you should be monitoring across your social media platforms.
Reach
Post reach refers to the number of unique users that see your post, or in other words, the number of unique newsfeeds on which your post appears. On Facebook, you can monitor both individual post reach as well as page reach. Page reach is the number of users who have viewed your page or profile within a given timeframe.
Impressions
Impressions are similar to reach but are not exactly the same. The distinctions between the two can get very nuanced for each platform. When it comes to the basics, you really only need to focus on Twitter impressions, but if you want an in-depth review of how reach and impressions work on other platforms, check out this Hootsuite blog article.
Twitter doesn’t track reach like other platforms do. Instead, they track impressions, which refer to the total number of times your tweet has been seen in search results or appeared in a user’s timeline. This number can get very high in comparison to reach, since the same person viewing a Tweet five times counts as five separate impressions (as opposed to reach, which counts the number of individual people who have viewed a post/page).
Engagement
Post engagement is the number of interactions users have with your content. This includes likes, comments and shares. While reach and impressions tell you how many people have seen your post or how many times it’s appeared in a search or newsfeed, engagement gives you more specific information about the ways that your audience interacts with your content and how often they do so.
Engagement can have different names across different platforms. For example, when you share something on Pinterest, you “Pin” a post to a board; on Twitter you retweet, but both are just platform-specific ways of saying that someone shared information that was initially posted by someone else.
Ultimately, engagement is a measure of your audience’s level of interest in your content and your brand, so you want to aim for this metric to increase over time.
Applause Rate
Applause rate falls under the umbrella of engagement. Instead of representing all types of interactions, your applause rate strictly refers to the number of approval actions (likes, favorites, etc.) you get on your posts relative to your total number of followers. This is another way you can measure the value of your posts to your followers.
You can calculate your applause rate by dividing the total number of “applause” or “approval” actions within a given period by your total number of followers and multiply by 100.
Follower and Audience Growth Rate
Follower growth rate is the number of new followers you gain within a given timeframe, shown as a percentage of your total following. You can calculate your growth rate by dividing the number of new followers by the number of existing followers and multiplying by 100.
Audience growth rate is calculated the same way, but instead of using follower counts from just one platform, you add up new followers across all platforms and divide by the sum of your existing followers across all platforms.
Since follower counts are openly displayed, you can also track these metrics for your competitors to see how you compare.
Try getting started by looking at these metrics and recording them monthly to get an idea of how your social media is doing and what might need to be adjusted or improved. For more help growing your social media presence, contact AG Marketing Solutions at (610) 337-8484.
