What Metrics you Should be Paying Attention to in Your Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing these days not only involves analytics as a necessary measuring tool but now a marketer must understand the distinction between social media metrics and social media analytics.   Fully understanding the difference can have effect your social media marketing efforts.  For this reason, it is to your advantage to complete a social media marketing course which will fully explain the subtle tactics involved in all forms of social media marketing.

Social media marketing strategy inclusions

As all marketers already know, every marketing strategy must include a good measurement plan.  This is a necessity to get the most value from your social media marketing and is a vital tool to help you analyse what is working and simply what isn’t.

All social media platforms are designed to drive awareness, no matter what the subject, business or marketing strategy.  Therefore, it’s crucial to fully understand the importance of social media to ensure that you stay on top of your marketing game.

The real purpose behind social media

We all know that the real reason behind social media marketing is to build brand awareness, which means increasing your brand’s visibility.  Social media allows you to build relationships through communicating with your target audience.

However, understanding the purpose of social media is all good and well, but without the usage of adequate metrics to measure your social media marketing strategy, well, it can all be quite a pointless exercise.  The need to understand where you are hitting the nail on the head and where you’re missing it completely is vital to the success of your social media marketing campaigns.  Simply looking at the growth of your followers or engaging with your followers is no longer enough to be successful with your social media marketing.

Social media metrics explained

The need to review the overall response to your social media marketing is still relevant, however the time has come where marketers need to delve deeper and find out more.  This is where social media metrics come in to play, and there are a wide variety of social media analytic tools available that can easily provide you with these metrics.

Metrics provides you the opportunity of

Metrics for measuring your social media marketing strategy

There are many tools available nowadays to effectively measure your social media marketing strategy and it’s always a good idea to mix it up and combine the use of a few of the tools available depending on your individual needs.

Here are a few tools that are available to measure metrics for your social media marketing:

  • Frequency – How many times do you deliver the same message before you gain traction from your social media marketing efforts? It’s vital to monitor your audience’s behaviour and reaction to your content.
  • Reach – No one wants to bang their drum for the same crowd over and over so it’s important to reach new people on social media platforms. This is an important metric as the goal is to gain new followers and new shares.
  • Impressions – Measuring the number of times your post is being clicked on is one of the most insightful metrics. Knowing what triggers your target audience to click and read your content is great for comparing to your previous posts.
  • Shares and mentions – There’s not much point of social media marketing if your posts and content is not important or relevant with your target audience. With this top of mind, it’s important to measure the shares and mentions your posts are receiving on social media platforms.

Metrics sources to track your social media marketing

The following metrics sources are a good place to start your tracking and gain the most value out of metrics:

  • Websites, forums and blogs;
  • YouTube;
  • Facebook pages and group pages;
  • Twitter;

Metrics benefits

Now that we’ve established the absolute need to pay attention to metrics for your social media marketing strategy, let’s look at metrics for driving traffic and leads.

  • Click-through rate – monitoring your click-through rate is a brilliant way to judge how your audience is responding to your content.
  • Percentage of new impressions – measure the amount of new people are visiting your site.
  • Conversions – give your audience the information they need to convert to a customer through good social media content.
  • Referred traffic – it’s good to measure the amount of traffic you are receiving which is driven from your social media marketing.