What Social Media Metrics to Use?

Social media is probably the most important channel a modern business has to promote their work. It’s also a way to get quick feedback on how your business is doing and how the marketing campaign is received.

Knowing what social media metrics to focus on is therefore an essential part of a marketing campaign. There are plenty of different ones that you’ll be able to go in depth to but not all of them will tell you what you need to know about the engagement of your content.

Volume

Volume the first and the simplest thing to measure about your social media engagement is the volume. Simply put that’s how many posts and how much content are you putting out. That can sometimes be as simple as knowing how many followers you have and how many posts you create per a period of time.

This is the first step to help you with knowing how much your media content is costing you and how much income it produces; therefore, how much is it worth. It will also tell you how much shares are you getting.

Reach

Reach is a similar metric to volume, but it’s a separate thing and a metric that will let you know even more about your social media and how it’s affecting those who interact with it. It’s there to tell you how far is your content able to get to beyond your own circle of followers. The goal is for the content to travel on its own and far beyond your own followers without your control.

Having a large audience and thus a large reach is an important goal but there’s more to it than that. You should also go more into nuance about who your new audience is and how it’s different from your main base.

Engagement

Simply seeing the content that’s made by your social media team isn’t enough and it doesn’t prove how well that content is received or is it at all. The second metric to take into account and in regards to this is the engagement that the followers have with the content. It measures how many likes, dislikes, shares and comments the content is producing.

This metric however won’t let you know in what kind of spirit the followers are responding to the content. Have in mind that even bad publicity is publicity when measuring engagement.

Influence

This is a more difficult metric to measure but the technology used to do it is getting better by the day. It’s the matter of influence your social media has on its followers. Some businesses have great engagement and a far reach but their followers don’t act upon the content in the real world.

This is where influence is of great importance. An influential business is one that’s able to get the followers on social media to make purchases and look up products based on their recommendation.

Share of voice

Share of voice is a different metric than share itself. It measures how much of the conversation within the industry or within the area is about your business or made by your business. That will show you how well your business is doing within its competitor group and that’s maybe one of the most important metric you can look for.

The key to making the most out of this metric is to know what the area in which you want to measure yourself is. That’s sometimes much more difficult than it seems since the areas in which a business works in are not that easily defined.

Why it matters?

It’s possible to follow all of these metrics at once, but why is it important to be aware of the differences and the nuances between them? Businesses at different stages of their marketing need to focus on the different aspect of the audience and social media appeal.

That’s why you should try to hit all of these marks but not all of them at once and not all of them at the same time your business life cycle. It may also require to have separate teams for each of them.

Conclusion

There are many ways to measure how your social media campaign is doing and these are becoming more sophisticated and nuanced as time goes by. Knowing what to look for is an essential skill your marketing team will need to learn and adopt.  It’s not enough to know how far your post is traveling but what kind of reactions is it getting.

Social media is also a tool that can only go so far. Knowing how respected and influential your brand is may require you to use other tools combined with those of social media metrics to get the best results.