Social Media Metrics That Matter – Facts That Make Sense

Before diving to the nitty-gritty of metrics, let’s have some heart-to-heart talk first: Building a business requires hard work. It involves thankless grunt work, long working hours, and sometimes gives very little attention regarding immediate payoff.

Now, moving on to the ‘big things.’ User retention, customer acquisition, lead generation, etc. can take time, sometimes longer than what you expect. This circumstance may push you to go for long stretches minus the gratification of immediate validation. And these validation comes from seeing your statistics move up and going in the right direction.

Despite the fact that many organizations know the gravity of measuring their performance in social media and adjusting their strategies, they don’t know what particular area to focus on to improve their success rate.

The Fallacy

Sometimes there are sneaky metrics that make entrepreneurs feel good about themselves, thinking that there is progress at last. The hype continues as these people eagerly plug in these compelling numbers into their latest investor report.

The only problem here is that these numbers are not the real indicator of development or success. In fact, these figures merely give the illusion of success. No need to worry though, as this article is meant to help you cut through the bad stats.

Getting the right gear and knowing how to track social media metrics that matter with precision is the key elements to create an efficient game plan. Below are the top social media metrics that you can use to achieve your business goals.

Reach (or Impressions)

When we talk about reach concerning metrics, it pertains to the rate of how many people open a social media content due to particular reasons. These reasons include liking or following an account, paid promotions, and other terms of ‘exposures’ or ‘impressions.’

Take your cue from Facebook; a page with 3,000 ‘likes’ (or followers) posts a visual content with a certain caption, and its reach tallied to 1,532. This number means not everyone who follows or like the page saw the post.

On the other side of the coin, less than 1,532 people who monitor the page saw the content since the share of other people counts as part of the total reach. Thus, it’s safe to assume that 1,500 ‘likes’ come from users who saw the post and some shared, so that brings the total view rate up to 1,532.

You should know that reach is a paramount metric for several reasons. First, posts or content with a small reach are equivalent to wasted moments. Facebook’s algorithm begins curbing some content that people see from different brand images. The purpose of this action is to conceal the posts from a significant portion of individuals who follow a certain page.

The best way to improve your reach and profile ranking is to produce more engaging content, since page engagements is an indicator of how often the posts generate views.

The last but not the least reason: Total reach helps you create relevant ratio metrics using the remaining social metrics that we’ll discuss next.

Engagement

Engagement refers to the interaction of users to your feeds. Below are the standard forms of engagement:

• Clicking the image on a thumbnail to view its full size.
• Relying on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
• Retweeting or sharing a post.
• Liking or reacting to a post.
• Posting comments on a post.

Outstanding engagement means that every post you feed on social channels will generate a high engagement level. It’s even more ideal if every people within your reach will engage to your posts.

This ratio is quite impossible, but if you are paying close attention to your engagement, it will give you ideas on how to produce tempting feeds that people are sure to open and view.

Website Visit Conversions

Website visit conversions are also called ‘acquisitions.’ It refers to the number of people who follow links from your social accounts up to your site. It is a crucial metric for understanding how much interest your posts are drumming up for your business.

Of course, not every post will generate a link back to your website, but you will want to find out how often people are visiting your pages. The same thing goes for the frequency of returning visitors from social channels. You can observe this activity through tools like Google Analytics to track the referring sources by domain and check how naked URLs are performing.

Takeaway

One of the unique aspects of social media is its ability to measure the audience interactions accurately. Brands that can utilize this power can efficiently and quickly access large audience members more frequently with precise targeting.

Moreover, businesses should look to these three most critical and substantial metrics: Reach, engagement, and acquisitions.