Understanding Social Media Metrics
4-minute read
Measuring and analysing social media metrics is a crucial step in maintaining an effective and optimised strategy. But first, it’s important to have a thorough understanding of what the metrics mean.
Here’s what you need to know about your social media results:
Here’s what you need to know about your social media results:
Engagement
This is the number of times someone interacted with your posts such as likes, comments, shares, reactions, saves and retweets. Engagement is the best sign that people are interested in the content you share. Additionally, more engagement leads to more exposure due to social media algorithms. The algorithms are designed to show more people posts with high engagements. It’s best to measure engagement through engagement rate rather than the number of engagements on its own. Engagement rate assesses the average number of interactions your content receives per view. This is calculated by interactions divided by total reach, multiplied by 100.
Reach
The total number of people who see your content determines its reach. This includes people who saw it organically and people who saw it through paid boosting. Reach is an important metric as it helps us understand how much of the potential audience are seeing the content being produced.
Impressions
Most social media content is seen more than once by the same person; impressions indicate how many times a post was seen in total. Impressions helps us understand the virality of a post. Social media is saturated with content and people often need to see a post a few times before they interact with it.
Page likers (Facebook), followers (Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn), and subscribers (YouTube)
These are all different names for the same overarching concept; the number of people who have opted-in to receive updates from your page. ‘Followers’ is often used as a general term across all social media platforms.
Total
Monitoring the total number of followers your page has is the best way to track growth over time. It’s important to continually grow your brand’s following to increase your social media presence which will help you gain more awareness, interest, and conversions.
Demographics
Each social media platform offers its own version of audience insights to provide you with a general understanding of your audience’s demographics. Key demographic insights include gender, age, education, and income. These insights are useful for market segmentation. Determining the size of your potential market as well as who your strongest market is are crucial when developing new product or service offerings. Different demographics have individual wants and needs which can be assessed and used to your advantage. Certain demographics also exhibit distinctive buying patterns and characteristics.
Activity
Understanding when your audience is active on social media is essential to achieve the best possible reach and engagement. Social media platforms provide reporting on when your followers are most active. Activity can change depending on the day of the week, time of year and if any key events, celebrations or holidays are taking place (like Christmas or Easter). Knowing when your audience is active and what impacts their activity is valuable when scheduling content. Ensure to schedule and publish both your organic and paid content during times when your audience is usually active.
Video Retention
When posting videos on social media, it’s important to look further than reach, impressions, and engagement. Video retention allows you to see how long people are watching your videos for which can help you optimise your content. When looking at video retention, take note of when most people are clicking away from your video. If people are stopping your video prematurely, it could be too long. If long videos usually resonate with your audience but you’re seeing people click away at a certain point, consider a re-cut to make it more engaging.
Cost metrics
When determining the overall efficiency and performance of your campaign, cost metrics are extremely valuable.
Cost per click (CPC)
CPC measures the cost per link click on paid ads. This is calculated by dividing total spend by total link clicks. CPC can be used for campaigns with the objective of driving traffic to your website.
Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
CPM measures the cost per 1000 impressions on paid ads. It’s determined by total spend divided by number of impressions multiplied by 1000. CPM can be used for campaigns intended to drive brand awareness.
Cost per result (CPR) or cost per action (CPA)
CPR/CPA measures the cost based on a specific action or result on paid ads. This is the most valuable cost metric as it provides the most detailed data on campaign performance. The result or action measured is determined when the campaign is first set up. For example, the result being measured for a lead generation campaign would be number of leads. Total spend divided by number of results or actions is used to calculate CPR/CPA.
Ad Frequency
Not to be confused with impressions, ad frequency tells us the average number of times someone has seen a specific ad. Rather than the total number of times an ad has been seen. While impressions are important to recognise the virality of your content, ad frequency is important to understand when your content is losing impact. If your ad is being shown to the same people too many times over and they aren’t interacting, then it’s time to refresh the creative.
In today’s digital world, social media is a must-have for all types of businesses. Whether you’re completely new to social media, or looking to enhance and grow your current activities, the Content Republic team are here to help.
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