So, your company is now officially connected to social media. You’ve created a Twitter account, a Facebook page, an Instagram account and even a few Pinterest boards. You’ve started to answer customer queries, fellow fans, share important news and thank your supporters for their valuable help support.
Apart from that, how are you tracking and monitoring these social interactions?
If you’re using social media, you should be monitoring your progress. What other way will you know how you’re doing? The good news is that measuring your social media efforts is simpler than you might believe.
So, shall we go into the eight metrics that matter the most?
It’s also worth noting that not all of these KPIs will be relevant to every firm. So proceed with caution and make notes on only the metrics that seem to have a high level of resonance with your business.
1. Number of Engaged Commenters & Average Comments
Apart from spam, comments indicate that people are reading what you’re posting and connecting with it on a deep level.
Personally, I “like” several pages that appear on my newsfeed but never interact.
Their content is good, but I’m not a paying customer for the most part.
However, I follow a few brands and bloggers and respond to every question they ask me that appears in my news feed.
And most of the time, I’m a proud and pleased customer of these people… or will be in the not-too-distant future.
Because here’s the thing: just because someone “likes” your page or follows you doesn’t guarantee they’re a die-hard admirer of whatever you offer or teach.
Instead, it’s usually the people who actively connect with and comment on your content that is the most important to your business.
Instead of attempting to increase your likes or follower count (in the hopes that some of them would be the type of people that engage via comments), plan strategies to encourage the fans you already have to be actively involved.
This way, you’ll know you’re making the most of the work you’ve already put in to gain those followers, and I believe you’ll be pleasantly pleased with how having an active “community” in your comments will truly benefit you.
2. The Bounce Rate
When your analytics dashboard estimates bounce rate, it refers to the number of individuals who visit your website and then leave the page after only viewing one page, which happens real quick.
If you direct traffic to a landing page with no menu, it will have a high bounce rate even if it has a great conversion rate since consumers will look at that one page.
So, if that’s the case for your social media posts and ads that link back to your website, you can ignore the bounce rate.
However, if you’re utilising social media to drive traffic to a cornerstone, evergreen blog post, for example, bounce rate is a critical measure to monitor.
By paying attention to this metric, you can determine what types of information your social media followers are most interested in, what topics they aren’t interested in, and which case creates the greatest overall interest.
With this knowledge, you can better tailor your social media approach to what those people want, growing loyalty through those channels and obtaining the greatest bang for your buck in terms of more bottom-line KPIs like email subscribers, clients, and sales.
3. Number of Visits vs Number of Unique Visitors
Let’s start with some definitions:
Views: Each time someone visits your website, it counts as a visit.
Each person is only counted once as a unique visitor.
So, yeah, obtaining more and more unique visitors is vital, especially when building and scaling your business.
However, if you’re only interested in one-time visitors, you’re missing out on the true value of having a social media strategy in the first place.
(Don’t misunderstand me. This is an important indicator because it confirms your marketing efforts.)
So, in addition to longing after more one-of-a-kind guests, lust after enticing them to return again and again.
3. Number of Visits vs Number of Unique Visitors
Let’s start with some definitions:
Views: Each time someone visits your website, it counts as a visit.
Each person is only counted once as a unique visitor..
So, yeah, obtaining more and more unique visitors is vital, especially when building and scaling your business.
However, if you’re only interested in one-time visitors, you’re missing out on the true value of having a social media strategy in the first place.
(Don’t misunderstand me. This is an important indicator because it confirms your marketing efforts.)
So, in addition to longing after more one-of-a-kind guests, lust after enticing them to return again and again.
You stay top-of-mind, so people remember you even if they don’t have one of your unopened emails in their inbox or aren’t enrolled in one of your free email courses.
Because, in addition to driving additional traffic to your website, leveraging social to drive prior visitors back to your website goes them deeper and deeper into your loyalty and engagement efforts.
They delve further into your content each time they return, and over time, they get “sold” on what you do—either by becoming a newsletter subscriber or by purchasing something. (And don’t we all want all of our guests to buy something?)
It’s lighter and more fun than the seriousness you get into on your site, but having a high-touch strategy in place is still quite important.
And, to be honest, the more touches, the better.
The Online Marketing Institute estimates that it takes 7-13 (or more!) touches to convert a cold visitor into a viable sales lead.
4. On-Site Time
Consider the following two scenarios for someone who “bounced” off your site:
- An individual browsed down the page and then closed your tab five seconds later.
- A reader who read your blog post all the way through and opted in for your lead magnet at the end.
There is a wide range of possibilities and user behaviours between these two points. Still, I believe every one of us would choose behaviour that resembles the second option over the first, right?
Even if they didn’t go to another page and give us a “bounce.”
So, when combined with your bounce rate for social media visitors returning to your site, time on site can give you a good idea of how well you’re doing.
Oh, and did you know that you can’t monitor bounce rate if you’re utilising social media to drive people to a landing page with no menu?
This number, together with actual conversions, is ideal for determining the performance of such initiatives.
You may get a sense of how far your social traffic is getting down your page by asking your friends and family to browse through your site for different periods and seeing how far they get. (Alternatively, you could utilise heat map software to determine this.)
5. Funnels Created by Users
When the term “funnel” is used in internet marketing, it usually refers to the steps we build and the emails we send out to ensure that our leads and prospects consume the material we want them to finish at the time we want them to destroy it.
This usually helps us build ourselves up in their thoughts, and if done effectively, leads to more conversions than simply letting our site visitors look at our site and content for themselves.
And, while you should undoubtedly build these funnels to guide visitors through, it’s also critical to pay attention to the funnels users generate for themselves.
That is, if people follow a link you share on social media to an evergreen blog post, they may click on the links and call to action buttons you’ve included inside the piece… Alternatively, they might read the content, go to your About page, look at your price, and then read your team profiles before closing your tab.
Of course, a large number of people will follow the funnels you’ve created for them.
Knowing which funnels most social visitors generate for themselves, on the other hand, gives you a few incredibly useful things:
How familiar they are with your brand already
Whether they come for the blog content alone or are looking for more,
What pages do you need to optimise for funnel conversions if you haven’t already?
These funnels are very visible in Google Analytics.
Log into Google Analytics, scroll down to “Behavior” on the right-hand menu, and select “Site Content” under “Behavior Flow.
There, you can filter by landing pages, all content, exit pages, or specific content components. Of course, any content is a good place to start for generic data. However, if your social media initiatives are all about landing sites, look at those.
Click on “Behavior Flow” for an overview.
6. Organic Mentions
You want others to distribute your content on your behalf.
It’s one of the main reasons we obsessively include social share buttons on our web pages and actively solicit shares at the bottom of our content.
So it’s fantastic when people share our stuff using these buttons. It signifies that our efforts have been fruitful.
What’s even better is when readers become so involved in what you’re saying that they give you an online shout out without being urged to do so simply because one article’s social media teaser text included your Twitter handle.
A mention monitoring service like Mention is a terrific way to get notified when people talk about you without using your functional brain capacity to look for those mentions. This is useful, especially if you have a huge audience—or aspire to have a large audience.
You know you’re doing something right when you get positively referenced on social media.
And tracking these mentions is a fantastic method to engage with those who mention you, join in on conversations about you, and increase loyalty and interest through your social media channels even more.
You want others to distribute your content on your behalf.
Ecosia, a nonprofit search engine focused on tree planting, uses Mention to track articles that mention their business model and ensure that all information published about them is correct.
It’s a fantastic method for businesses to raise brand recognition and engage in areas of the internet where interest is growing.
7. Subscribers, Leads, and Sales
In other words, baseline metrics.
Or, in another, more direct phrase: your bottom line.
In my “modest” opinion, these are the only measurements that truly count.
Unfortunately, many social media marketers and well-intentioned business owners stop tracking before they reach these KPIs because they are concerned with click-through rates.
In fact, (again, in my opinion), tracking click-through rates isn’t all that important.
So what if only a few people click on one of your ads? If you have a limited exclusive audience, the only thing that matters is that those who do click through convert somehow, right?
I believe so.
However, I believe that so many people are preoccupied with click-through rates before considering these bottom-line metrics because the companies that provide platforms for running ads place a high value on click-through rates.
But do you know why they put so much emphasis on them?
Because they are paid for each click.
As a result, the more clicks you receive, the more money you make.
(As a side point, focusing too much on click-through rate gave birth to all that awful clickbait.)
The importance of click-through rates cannot be overstated… You do, after all, desire traffic from your advertising efforts. However, more crucial is that the importance of a click-through rate is not prioritised over the importance of a conversion rate.
Unless you’re getting zero traffic (or close to it) from your ad campaigns, and as long as you’re getting good conversions from the traffic you do get, click-through rate shouldn’t be a top-of-mind problem that you’re continually striving to improve.
8. Rate of Amplification
Again, this measure is about gauging engagement rather than numbers for the sake of numbers.
Essentially, your amplification rate indicates your ability to “amplify” your message based on the number of followers you already have.
Yes, it counts shares and follows, but it also puts those numbers into a more useful perspective.
This is how you calculate it:
Take a piece of material and count the number of times it was shared during a specific period. The number of shares can be totalled or restricted to a single social platform.
Then divide that total by the number of followers on the channels where you tallied the shares.
So, if you have 5,000 Facebook fans and an item that has been shared 300 times, the math looks like this:
300 divided by 5,000 equals 0.06
Then, divide that figure by 100 to get your amplification rate as a percentage. So, in this case:
6% is equal to 0.06 x 100.
With this statistic, you can estimate how far your message will spread based on your followers.
If you realise it’s a number you don’t like, you can work towards increasing it.
However, if you discover that it is significantly greater than you anticipated, you might devote more time to that particular social site to increase your chances of success.
I want to know what they (my audience) want to see from me after they get to my website. Therefore I look at people’s paths after clicking over from a LinkedIn or Twitter post.
From there, I can determine what content they are most interested in, allowing me to expand my business with more of that stuff.
What were the top social media metrics ideas that sprang to mind for you when reading this post?
