Measure Twice, Post Once - Using Metrics for Social Media Marketing

Information in this blog post was obtained from Neil Patel, The Hootsuite Blog, and The HubSpot Blog.

Effective social media strategy requires accurate measurement of relevant metrics. Image courtesy of Unsplash.

You've done it. You overhauled your organization's social media and are gaining followers. You feel as though your efforts are paying off. But how do you know?

Measuring social media metrics might seem daunting. However, most platforms have data collection tools built-in, doing the heavy lifting for you. So, what metrics should you measure and why? Social media metrics can be split into three categories, how well do consumers: Know, Interact, or Act?

Know

1. Reach

2. Growth Rate

3. Share of Voice

Interact

1. Engagement Rate

2. Audience Insights

3. Customer Response Rate

Act

1. Click-Through-Rate

2. Conversion Rate

3. Cost-Per-Click

4. Cost-Per-Thousand-Impressions

5. Return on Investment

Know

Long before anyone will purchase from your brand, they first must know about your brand. According to Neil Patel, social media reach can tell you how many people are exposed to your content. This is useful as it tells you how many people see your posts. However, it does not tell you how many of those people retain the content or interact with it.

Reach tells you how many people saw a post, but how do you tell who is interested in your brand? HubSpot's Kayla Carmicheal explains audience growth rate, which is the number of followers gained during a certain period. The growth rate is an important measure if you want to increase brand awareness or measure the success of a certain campaign.

Consumers might know your brand, but how can you know how well you stack up to the competition? Eddie Shleyner of Hootsuite covers social share of voice (SSoV), a method of comparing mentions to competitors. A mention occurs whenever your brand is referenced on social media, whether directly or indirectly. If your brand has a number of mentions higher or lower than competitors, you can identify strengths and weaknesses with your strategy. Just be sure to see if they are positive or negative mentions. A large number of negative mentions is worse than a small number of positive ones!

These metrics, combined with others listed in the links throughout, can help you identify how well your social media strategy is driving brand awareness and interest.

Use social media to spur interaction from your target audience. Image courtesy of Unsplash.

Interact

You need to measure how often people interact with your content once they follow your brand's social media accounts. Neil Patel refers to engagement rate metrics as what people do with your post, from likes to comments to shares. Use these metrics to find what content people liked, what they didn't, and how you can better tailor your content to your target audience.

Once you have an established audience, you can benefit from learning more about what content they want to see. Kayla Carmicheal identifies audience insights (demographics) that can help you better target an interested audience. Using these demographics can not only help your social media marketing, but other marketing initiatives too.

While most of these metrics focus on the consumer's actions, some hone in on how the brand is doing for the consumer. Kayla Carmicheal presents the customer response rate, or how many engagements were responded to by the brand. While it is likely improbable to respond to every like, the more you can engage with your audience the more they will learn from you about the brand and the more you'll learn from them about their preferences.

These metrics, combined with others listed in the links throughout, can help you identify how many people are interested in your brand enough to interact with it and how you can better reach your audience.

To learn tips for increasing interaction on your social media, take a look at my colleague Matraca Beesley's post here.

After building rapport with your audience, it's time for action! Image courtesy of Unsplash.

Act

Having an engaged audience is great, but driving consumers to act is the goal of social media marketing. According to Hootsuite's Eddie Shleyner, click-through-rate is the number of people who click on a call-to-action link out of the total number of people who saw the post. This can tell you how enticing your offer is and can help you experiment with post styles to see what works and what does not.

Eddie Shleyner also discusses conversion rate, which is the number of people who take the desired action after clicking on a post's link. This is distinct from click-through-rate, as it captures whether people take the action, not just whether they end up on your landing page.

Now, let's talk about paid advertising. While paying for ads is not the only way to market on social media, it can be an effective way to get your brand out to potential consumers. Eddie Shleyner breaks down cost-per-click, which shows how much it cost for an ad to be clicked by a user. This can help you understand whether the money you are spending is worthwhile.

Eddie also breaks down cost-per-thousand-impressions, which shows how much it cost for 1000 people to see your ad. This is distinct from cost-per-click as it only measures people who were shown your ad, not people who interacted with it.

These paid ad metrics can help you measure specific ad effectiveness, but how can you tell if your ad strategy is working for you? Kayla Carmicheal from HubSpot covers return on investment (ROI). This breaks down either the real or estimated dollar value created by your ads compared to the costs incurred. This can be different depending on the campaign, as your goal might range from sales to brand awareness to email list sign-up. If this is a positive number, the ads were valuable. If it's a negative number, you might want to rethink your strategy.

These metrics, combined with others listed in the links throughout, can help you determine if your efforts on social media are paying off and identify potential points of improvement.

Social media metrics can be intimidating, but remember, most of the calculations are done for you. With these tips showing you how to analyze metrics, you'll be ready to take your social media strategy to the next level!

Resources

Carmicheal, K. (2022, January 25). Which social media metrics are marketers tracking? [new research]. HubSpot Blog. Retrieved April 13, 2022, from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-media-metrics-ceos-cares-about.

Patel, N. (2021, August 20). 5 essential social media metrics you should be measuring right now. Neil Patel. Retrieved April 13, 2022, from https://neilpatel.com/blog/essential-social-media-metrics/.

Shleyner, E. (2020, November 3). 19 social media metrics that really matter-and how to track them. Hootsuite Blog. Retrieved April 13, 2022, from https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-metrics/.