Every business knows the importance of adopting social media in their digital marketing efforts because social media presence has become quite critical today. And, also it is quite overwhelming to have this presence. You may be trying your level best to generate and share good content, interact with visitors and customers, and try to make sense of it. But the biggest question you need to answer is whether your efforts are giving you good rewards or not.

If you are just concentrating on your fans or followers, you are seriously missing out on important insights. If you seriously want to evaluate the results of your social media efforts, it is crucial to track the right social media metrics. Social media metrics play a vital role and can be your window through which you can peep into the interests, desires and annoyance of your customers. These metrics give you an insight about the overall behaviour of your visitors, prospects and customers. If you do a comprehensive analysis of these metrics, they will fuel insights to your overall digital marketing plan.

What are the important social media metrics you should be measuring?

Let’s discuss about some major social media metrics you should be measuring.

Volume

The first, easiest, and most important metric you need to measure is the volume. By volume, we mean here size. What is the size of the conversation about your trade name?  Capacity is the great indicator of interest. You will notice people tend to talk more about things they love or hate. Count the number of messages you get for your brand and the number of people who talk about your brand. You should track how these numbers change with time. Let us take an example here. Facebook insights have a very useful metric. It is a metric called “people talking about this”. These metric measures how many people posted on their walls about your brand. You should analyse when the volume or capacity is higher. You can use this information for circulation of messages during time when the volume is higher. This will give you more engagement.

Reach

Reach is also a very crucial social media metric. It measures the spread of social media conversation.  Reach can help you measure the intensity of your content. You will come to know how far your content disseminating. You will also get the actual size of your audience for your message. It gives you the exact figure of potential audience size. An important action such as clicks, retweets, or replies help in calculating the reach metric. But, remember, reach becomes more powerful when compared to other engagement metrics.

Engagement

Engagement is also considered an important area for measuring the effectiveness of applied social media plan.  Engagement metric lets you know how people are participating in the conversation or how they are spreading your message or engaging with topics you post. Activities on your posts like comments, tweets, replies and likes are helpful in gazing who all is taking active part in your content and, ultimately your brand. Pay attention to posts and messages that generate more user engagement.

Influence

Influence is another social media metric which lets you measure the results of your social media efforts. You need to find out who is talking about your brand and what they are talking. There are a number of tools which measure the social media metric, influence. And, all of them measure in a different manner. Keep in mind, audience size has nothing to do with influence. Looking at the influence metric, you can plan who to reach out to when you are preparing for a campaign.

Share of voice

How well you are doing on social media? You need to consider share of voice metric to measure this. You need to find out how conversations about your brand relate to conversations taking place in your industry. You should try to find out how your competitors are doing on social media.  Try to find out what is making them successful in this online platform. It is easy to find the conversations on social media as they are public. You can measure your competitors’ results as easily as you can measure your results.

Paying attention to your social media metrics is crucial

Your social media metrics give you insight about the behaviour of your customers.  The three important applications of your social media metrics are customer service, consumer experience and demographic insights. Although a recent survey indicated social media to be the least popular way for customer care, but still you will find customers interacting with their service providers through different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and GooglePlus. They prefer social media medium when their initial queries are not solved via email or phone.

Next, talking about consumer experience. Your social media metrics gives you a real time analysis of what engages your customers the most. This real-time view can help you in improving customer experience. The social media metrics also give you an insight about the demographics. You will get information about the demographic information of your customers, about their interests, genders, ages and profession.

Hope you enjoyed reading the post!   Concentrate on the above social media metrics if you want to measure your social media efforts seriously.

Derek is Social Media Manager at Home Strategic – Isle of Man