CRyder Design

What are Social Media Metrics?

Author, Christina Newberry defines social media metrics as, “the data points that show you how well your social media strategy is performing.” With billions of people spending a large amount of their time on social media, it’s common for brands to use this as an opportunity to grow their audience and customer base. When social media is used to help accomplish business goals, it is important to make sure that metrics are considered to ensure the success of your social media strategy. Some common social media metrics are engagement rate (likes, comments, retweets, shares, etc.), audience growth rate (number of new followers), impression rate (the number of times users see your posts), and reach (the number of users who see your posts). Although these are some of the most common metrics that are analyzed, this is by no means an exhaustive list.

Who is My Audience?

To gain an understanding of your audience, it is important to look at some of your follower demographics. By looking at demographics, it will be able to let you know the general age group of your followers, their gender, their age, and sometimes their interests and location too. This information can be important when crafting social media content. You’ll want to gear your content to satisfy the most common demographics within your audience. Author, Alyssa Hirose explains, “Understanding social media demographics will help you fine-tune your marketing strategy and reach the right people with your message.” When you craft your content to fit your audience, your engagement rate will likely increase as a result as well!

Am I Doing Better than My Competitors?

To assist in determining where you stand in line with your competition, you can use audience growth rate. Audience growth rate shows you how many new followers you gained on social media within a certain period of time. This can be compared (through something like a competitive analysis) to your competition, to understand if you are gaining more, less, or about the same amount of followers. Author, Althea Storm explains, “As more people sign up to social media platforms, brands will also gain more followers. But you shouldn’t ask yourself, “How many new followers did we gain last month?’ Instead, think about how fast you gained last month’s followers, and if you gained them faster than your competitors.” There is a variety of different strategies that can help improve audience growth rate, but ensure the one that you pick will work the best for your specific audience!

What Are People Saying About My Brand?

To learn more about what people are saying about your brand, you can use social sentiment. Social sentiment provides an understanding of the feelings, opinions, and attitudes of your audience. Whether the conversation surrounding your brand is good or bad, social sentiment will help you learn more about it. Author, Boaz Grinvald explains, “Social sentiments are usually expressed through posts or comments on networks like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, and so on. For businesses that care about managing their image and their brand reputation, social sentiments are crucial to gather data on their consumers and their competitors.” Social sentiment will also help you improve or maintain your brand’s reputation and audience satisfaction. If there is something that your audience or customers don’t like, they are bound to let you know, and most often this is done through social media. They are providing you with feedback that will in turn allow you to fix the issue(s) and improve audience satisfaction!

When is the Best Time to Publish?

There are two different metrics that you can look at when attempting to determine the best time to post on social media: impressions and engagement. A combination of the two will provide you with an understanding of the time your audience engages with your posts the most. Impressions measure the number of times that people see your posts, and engagement measures the number of engagements (likes, comments, retweets, shares, etc.) that your post received. Author, Alfred Lua explains, “To find out the best times to post for your social media account, sort your posts by your desired metric, such as likes, impressions, or engagement rate. Then see when the top posts were published or if any times keep coming up for your top posts. Note down the times. These are your current best times to post.” These metrics and the information that they provide you with can help you to define your posting schedule. It’s important to post at times that receive higher engagement from your audience for the most success.

Which Content Does My Audience Enjoy the Most?

Similar to figuring out the best time to post, engagement can be used to help determine the content that performs the best with your audience. If you notice that your Instagram Reels are getting more engagement than just simple images, this is very informative! This information is letting you know that your audience prefers Instagram Reels rather than images. Metrics and analytics can help you determine exactly what type of content performs the best for you.

Which Social Media Network is the Best for My Brand?

In order to determine the best social media network for your brand, it’s important to understand where your audience currently is and meet them there. Using share of social voice can help you to understand how many people are talking about your brand across different social media networks. If there are a lot of people talking about your brand on Facebook, but not a lot of people talking about your brand on Tik Tok, this lets you know that of the two, Facebook would be the better choice for your brand. Author, Hannah Macready explains, “Tracking your share of voice can help you understand how visible your brand is on social media. A higher share of voice usually leads to more sales and brand awareness, so it’s definitely worth paying attention to.” It is important to meet your audience where they already are, rather than have them meet you where you want them to be. 

How Can I Have a Better Performance on Social Media?

There are many metrics that should be looked at to assess your brand’s performance on social media: virality rate (measures how much your content is shared by your audience), amplification rate (the relationship between shares per social media post to follower count), engagement rate (likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc.), and audience growth rate (the number of new followers in a certain period of time). There is really no *one* metric that can be used to measure the entirety of your brand’s success on social media. It’s likely that you’ll have to assess multiple different metrics to understand where and how exactly your performance could be improved. Author, Aaron Agius explains, “Monitoring your brand’s online performance is important, but keeping a close eye on your audience metrics is even more crucial. It’s the best way to create targeted, customized content to improve engagement with your audience.” 

Wrapping Up

To answer each of these questions, it is important to identify the proper metric to analyze. Each of these metrics may vary depending on the specifics of the questions that you are asking. When you come up with a question, do your best to break it down to its simplest form to assist in identifying which metric to use to answer it.