Tracking social media metrics is essential for marketers and business owners that are using social networks for marketing. To find out whether your efforts are resultful and to optimize them, you need to take a closer look at data. Which metrics are worth tracking and can provide you with the most interesting insights? Read on to find out!
Conversion rate
When it comes to the website, the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take action you want them to, against all page’s visitors. For example, people who subscribe to a newsletter, purchase a product, download gated content, etc. To measure how effective are social networks for your business, you can track the conversions from social media posts. That way, you’ll find out which content was relevant and suitable for your audience. Focus not only on driving traffic to your website but attracting the right audience to visit your page and convert.
To measure conversion rate you need to use an URL shortener, such as RocketLink, to track your link clicks. Divide the number of conversions per total number of visits from the particular link and multiple by 100. The result will be a conversion rate from the given campaign.
Social share of voice (SSoV)
This metric can paint a picture of your position on the market. It measures mentions of your brand in comparison to your competitors. Social share of voice is crucial to know if your business is visible and leading the market or if you need some improvements in your strategy.
Mentions online can be direct or indirect. Direct mentions, for example on Facebook, are posts and comments where your brand is tagged. In other cases, when users write your brand’s name but don’t tag your brand, we can call them indirect mentions. It’s essential to track both direct and indirect mentions because both of them matter (social media users not always know how to tag a brand or simply don’t want to do that).
To track social share of voice you need a social media monitoring tool, such as Brand24 or SentiOne. Track your competitors during the same period and compare the results. In these platforms, you can also automatically check the sentiment of comments and posts so that you’ll know if they’re positive, negative, or neutral. You can make the most of it by answering the complaints and make up for your brand’s mistakes.
Virality rate
Virality rate informs marketers how often people are sharing social media content. To measure such metric you need to divide the number of shares by the number of total impressions. Multiply the result by 100 to get the virality rate percentage.
Virality rate gives you the remarks on your content. It’s far more insightful than measuring just likes because sharing requires more effort and engagement from people. Moreover, sharing a post means that a user finds the content so valuable that other people might find it useful or entertaining as well.
Average engagement rate
This metric shows how engaging your content is in total. To accurately measure your engagement rate you need to consider it in the context of the number of your followers. That way, you can find out if your posts are relevant for your target audience.
Add up all of the actions taken by the users, such as likes, comments, and shares, and divide them by the total number of your followers to find out what is the average engagement rate percentage of the particular post.
Observe which posts have the highest average engagement rate and try to find common features and use them as benchmarks for your future content plans. Try to maximize this metric and engage with your audience instead of posting irrelevant content.
Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR expresses how often users click on call-to-actions in your posts. It can’t be mistaken with other engagement rates, because it’s designated to CTAs. That way, you can measure the effectiveness of your posts and apply it also for organic business growth.
Shorten your links and add UTM parameters to track the performance. Thanks to the analysis of clicks you’ll find out whether the content was appealing and relevant to your target group. By dividing the number of clicks by the number of total post impressions and multiplying it by 100, you’ll get CTR.
To optimize CTR you can work on your CTAs, try out new ones, conduct A/B tests, and find out which version is the most accurate and resultful. You can also improve images and copy of the posts to get users’ attention and increase CTR.
To make data-driven decisions it’s crucial to track the right social media metrics that reflect which content is resultful and can help you shape further campaigns.
