Tracking Social Media Metrics
Taking on a social media strategy requires more than implementing specific activities. You also need to track how those activities are paying off. You don’t want to waste time on social media tactics that don’t benefit your business when you could be spending more time on what it working and trying new strategies that will help boost your brand awareness. Here’s what you need to know about tracking social media metrics:
Tools vs Manual Tracking
Social media monitoring tools are a great way to discover how your tactics are working and what people are saying about your brand and business. You can also gain important insight into what consumers are saying about your competitors, your industry in general, how you respond to various situations happening with the world, and your products and services. Social media tracking tools can conveniently gather and present important metrics for you to learn from.
While tools are helpful, you don’t want to ignore tracking social media metrics manually. As you begin your social media strategy, it will be too early to rely on tools for monitoring metrics. It can take 6 months or more to truly assess whether a tactic is paying off. In the meantime, you can monitor things such as how each post is performing by noting likes, shares, and comments. You can understand better which topics are getting the attention of your target audience and deliver more of them.
Timing Matters
As mentioned, it can take 6 months or more to truly know whether a tactic is paying off. If you are tracking metrics both manually and with tools, but you aren’t seeing much progress after one, three, or five months, resist the urge to switch tactics. It takes time to see accurate results. Switching tactics too often will skew the results and never give you a clear picture of how your strategy is doing.
Metrics to Track
The metrics you track can differ depending on your business and goals, but the most common metrics used include:
- Engagement rate. This tells you how engaged your followers are with the content you post. It’s an important metric that will help determine which direction you take your content. You can create more content that appeals to your followers.
- Followers. You want to know not only how many followers you have at a given time, but also how your follower growth is progressing. You want to know whether you are trending up or down and adjust your strategy from there.
- Click-through rate. CTR refers to how many people click on a specific link that you post on social media to get to additional content. The link could lead them to a blog post or to the page that sells your product or service. This metric helps you to understand your customers better. A low CTR can imply that you are targeting the wrong audience.
- Conversion rate. This metric measures the frequency of your social media content that leads to a conversion, such as a sale, download, or a subscription that you offer, such as a newsletter. This is a valuable metric for determining of your social media content is valuable to your target audience.
Some metrics will matter more depending on your business and goals, but these are helpful to everyone to a certain degree. It’s important to take information gathered from metrics with a grain of salt because things can change at the drop of a hat and can be misleading. Page views, for example, won’t tell you how many individual users are viewing your website. This can leave you with a skewed impression of viewership. Having a general idea of how everything is going never hurts, but don’t rely on this data alone.
Tracking metrics is an important step in making sure that your social media strategy is on the right track. You want to be investing time and energy in the activities that are working and adjusting the rest.
Categorized in: Social Media
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