What Is The Best Way To Measure Social Media Engagement? What Is The Best Metric To Look At?
To help you measure social media engagement, we asked marketing experts and small business owners this question for their best insights. From measuring the retention of your client base to studying conversion rates, there are several metrics to focus on in order to accurately measure engagement on your brand’s social media accounts.
Here Are Six Of The Best Metrics To Measure Social Media Engagement:
- Measure the Retention of Your Client Base
- Pay Attention to Your Reach Count
- Focus on Audience Growth Rate
- Use Social Media Analytics Tools
- Measure the KPIs That Match Your Marketing Goals
- Study Conversion Rates
Measure the Retention of Your Client Base
Retention is just as important as expansion. We believe in the quality of our work and the strength of our brand, and when clients see the work we do for them, they are more likely to share it.
We use Instagram and LinkedIn to solidify our brand awareness, and the more our regular clients come back to us, the more likely we will get engagement from new potential clients and even potential employees. The best measurement of our success has always been retaining our client base.
Stephen Skeel, 7 Wonders
Pay Attention to Your Reach Count
Pay attention to your reach count. This number ties insignificantly with your brand awareness. When people do not like your posts or click on links related to the posts, this does not mean that they are not seeing them or appreciating them.
Furthermore, they could be going straight to your website rather than shopping through your Instagram account, which is why your engagement rate on Instagram is not always 100% successful. This is why you should rely on how many people you are reaching to measure your overall success on social media.
Drew Sherman, Carvaygo
Focus on Audience Growth Rate
The audience growth rate is a metric that counts how many new followers your brand gains on social media in a certain period of time. It’s not just a simple tally of new followers. Rather, it calculates the number of new followers as a fraction of your total audience. Getting 10 or 100 new followers in a month can provide you with a strong growth rate while you’re just starting out.
However, once you have a larger established following, you will require more new followers to keep the momentum going. Track your net new followers (on each platform) over a reporting period to compute your audience growth rate. To calculate your audience growth rate percentage, divide that amount by your entire audience (on each platform) and multiply by 100.
Ayman Zaidi, GreatPeopleSearch
Use Social Media Analytics Tools
There are various ways to measure social media engagement, but some methods are more accurate than others. One of the most accurate ways to measure engagement is to use social media analytics tools. These tools track how many people are interacting with your content, what they’re interacting with, and how they’re interacting. This data can give you a clear picture of which content is resonating with your audience and what isn’t.
The best metric to keep track of is interactions per post. This number will show you how many people are engaging with your content on a per-post basis. If you see a steady decline in this number over time, it indicates that your content isn’t resonating as well as it used to.
You can use this metric to fine-tune your content strategy and ensure that you’re always creating content that your audience wants to see. When you’re putting relevant, engaging content in front of them, your social media traction will naturally increase.
Brandon Schroth, Reporter Outreach
Measure the KPIs That Match Your Marketing Goals
The best metrics pair with specific measurable goals–for example, we track how well our social media posts improve our clickthrough rates. If you were trying to increase the reach of your business, you might track total impressions instead.
As an eCommerce business, we focus on metrics measuring our conversions and clickthrough performance. Engagement and community-building on social media are additional useful tools for strengthening your brand reputation, but we use content marketing strategies via social platforms primarily to attract new leads and increase our sales.
For the best engagement, we put our efforts into curating high-quality video content like recipes that users can save and make at home. By measuring how well our posts persuade users to visit our website, we can refine our content over time to be optimally effective.
Jason Panzer, Hexclad
Study Conversion Rates
The best way to measure social media engagement is through conversion. Should you be looking at how many people are engaging with your posts? How many followers do you have? These may be important metrics, but they don’t tell you much about whether or not your social media strategy is working. Conversion is a much better way to measure engagement.
If you have an eCommerce store and you want to know if your social media strategy has been successful, look at how many people click on links in your posts and then make purchases on your website. If your goal is to drive traffic to your website, then look at how many people click through from each post and visit your website.
That will allow you to see which posts are driving traffic and which aren’t and gives you a better analysis of your overall engagement on social media.
Shaun Connell, Connell Media
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