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What Metrics Can I Use to Track My Social Media?

Katelyn Ahern Digital Project Manager
#Digital Marketing, #Inbound Marketing, #Social Media
Published on February 4, 2014
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How can you measure your social media presence? Learn what metrics you can use to track the success of your social media campaigns.

In the last blog, we discussed the importance of tracking social media metrics for future success. Now that we know the importance of creating a metric-based foundation for your social media strategy, let’s break it down even further. I will go through the top three metrics you must be tracking in order to evaluate your social media campaigns.

Awareness

The first area of social media that you should be tracking is the awareness that your social media work is creating for your business. This can be tracked through the number of fans, followers, or connections. The term each network uses may be different, but the number of people who are aware of what you are doing is an important statistic to know. Another way to measure your business awareness is the number of impressions your social media messages has received. Impressions can be a frustrating metric because a lot of factors can change your impressions such as: time of day you publish, your edgerank, or how many shares/ retweets each message received. I would recommend tracking this metric, but taking the numbers with a grain of salt. Don’t take it personally if it is lower than you expect, because these metrics can adjust rapidly from message to message and will require a different strategy for each social media platform.

Engagement

After you have a good grasp on your awareness, you will want to take your metrics a step further and track the engagement of your followers. How valuable is a social media connection if they aren’t listening? Have you ever been to a networking event where you couldn’t hear the person you were trying to connect with? Not the best place to connect, huh? Well, this metric will help you understand which messages are getting your customers to engage with you. Measuring impressions is a great start, but further value comes at the engagement level. This can be tracked in all social media channels based on likes, re-tweets, shares, clicks, comments, etc.

Reach

The final area, and possibly the most important metric, is evaluating your social reach. Social reach is calculated by multiplying awareness times engagement, and this is where the social media amplification comes in. The real beauty of social media happens here. When one of your followers interacts with a piece of content that you have distributed on social media, then all of their followers see this interaction as well. This leads to your content getting put in front of fresh eyes who may not already know you. Having your followers share your content with their followers is a great way to grow your reach by adding more followers and an increased amount of potential.

There are many ways to track the success of each social media campaign, so you’ll want to make sure that before you decide which metrics to use as you consider what your goal is. Are you increasing your business awareness? Engagement? Or your reach? This is the first step to making sure you’re on your way to social media success. Don’t forget to keep up with your metrics and constantly test new strategies. Do you have a foolproof formula for your business? Leave us a comment below so we can all learn from your ideas.