Introduction
Today, Social Media is the loudest buzz in the human race with more than3.4 a billion active users spending nearly 2.5 hours on online platforms each day. As a result, from entertainment to entrepreneurship everything happens through online social platforms as it provides global reach to the users without much cost involvement. Moreover, the Return on Investment (ROI) through social media platforms is surprisingly huge. Anyone with an understanding of platform (Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn) algorithms can make the best out of such means of communication and interaction. Thus, brand creation requires keeping a regular track of the essential social media metrics to check the campaign progress every weekend or month-end.
What is Social Media Metrics?
Ideally, it refers to the use of data for assessing the impact of social media activities on the marketing campaign and revenue generation process of an organization or individual. The metrics serve as the milestone which the users target in their social space to identify the overall performance of the campaign. Thus, it is an AI-driven strategy to evolve as a great influencer or into a brand identity with great consistency.
In other words, social media metrics act as the guidebook to evaluate the campaign performance and hit the desired goals. Considerably, these metrics define the audience, their reactions, and recommendations on the provided content. The journey of powerful brand creation begins with a health marketing campaign at large. As a result, to develop successful campaign few points need to be taken care of.
- Analyze past activities and understand the audience’s preferences.
- Develop the strategy in reflection to the goal for measuring success.
- Understand the audience category based on age, gender, locality, etc.
- Create compelling content to encourage people to share more.
- Keep making necessary adjustments to the campaign as and when required.
Types of Social Media Metrics to Track
With the numerous applications dwelling on social media platforms, some have actually dominated the sphere. As a result, these few powerful social media platforms have become an essential part of one’s routine. These metrics have been categorized into several dimensions depending on their nature yet the success of each metric is important to create greater influence.
Visibility Social Media Metrics
The metrics deal with user awareness of the brand to study the reach and impact relationship. Here the focus lies on two main sub-metrics – Impression and Reach. Thus, it only defines the wavelength of the campaign from the main user page to the ultimate user and does not talk about reactions.
| Metric | Description |
| Impressions | It refers to the frequency of posts/ads visibility on the user’s timelines. The metric is based on the concept, “More people see, more they believe.” As a result, impressions are the first step of observing the success rate of the digital marketing campaign. |
| Reach | It is a statistical study to determine the viewers and the follower count of the users coming through the marketing campaign. Generally, the sub-metric is used in conjunction with another social metric to understand the overall view of the campaign and growing brand awareness. |
Responsive Social Media Metrics
It indicates the comparative of the brand’s market reach in comparison to its competitors. Moreover, it helps to develop a clear indication of how people feel and respond towards brand campaigns and identities. The share of voice metric considers two major aspects – Sentiment and Volume.
| Metric | Description |
| Sentiment | It refers to the measurement of feelings, attitudes, and opinions, expressions of the customers or end-users towards brand performance on social media. Every entity aims to reach positive sentiments and avoid negative ones. Thus, negative sentiments on social platforms serve as the means of communicating the brand’s weaker side. As a result, one gets an idea as to how and where to fill the gaps. |
| Volume | The volume focuses on understanding how many people have framed an opinion about the brand. It is observed through several tags, mentions, and brand-related hashtags on social media platforms. Moreover, the less response indicates lesser reach or reaches to an inappropriate audience. Therefore, it helps to streamline overall performance by highlighting the shortfalls. |
Engagement Social Media Metrics
The engagement category of metrics helps to define the interaction of the users with the brand content. Healthy engagement is the ultimate aim of every entity that sees social media as the best marketing platform. Though engagement metrics do not clearly define the real scenario at large yet it is considered as the vanity metric. The Content Marketing Institute indicates that vanity metrics consider non-transactional marketing campaigns to head towards better brand awareness, the share of voice, and troubleshooting marketing problems.
| Metric | Description |
| Number of Likes, Comments, Shares, and Clicks | No wonder today everyone aims to witness a growing number of likes, comments, shares on their page and profile. Thus, to make it happen an educated approach towards social media marketing is required. The combination of engagement metrics with other related metrics helps to define if a “call to action” is being made by the end-user or not. As a result, based on such analysis future strategies and campaigns are designed. |
| Engagement Rate | Besides, analyzing the engagements through likes comments, shares, etc, engagement rate serves as an additional performance evaluation metric. It is determined by dividing the number of content engagements by the total impressions or reach. The higher engagement rate indicates the better success of the campaign and vice-versa. |
Actionable Social Media Metrics
After the required reach, positive impressions, and healthy engagement, the brand calls for conversion. It refers to the tendency of a person to make a purchase or take instructed “call to action”. The referrals, conversions, click-through rates are considered the easiest way to track the campaign performance. Google Analytics or Mixpanel are the two most widely used analytics software for the purpose.
| Metric | Description |
| Click-Through Rates | It refers to the number of clicks made divided by the impression of the post. For example, if there are 8 clicks and 150 impressions, then Click-through Rate (CTR) comes out to be 5.3%. Hence, a higher CTR rate indicates the effectiveness of the overall campaign. |
| Referrals | It talks about the sources through which visitors reach the entity’s page and website. Today, web-analytics softwares are used to determine and monitor the referral sources by drilling down the referral data of the social media platforms. |
| Conversions | Conversion is an action taken by well-convinced users to make purchases, register, signup, adding to the email list. Since calls to action vary differently for all entities, therefore there is no rigid format of conversion in practice. All it indicates is that the marketing campaign has taken a successful turn. |
Customer-Oriented Social Media Metrics
The metric takes into consideration the post-conversion scenarios of the campaign. It considers satisfaction level, use cases, the behavioral approach of the users deriving out of the campaigned-brand involvement. Broadly, the three essential aspects of the customer metrics are testimonial testing, analyzing customer satisfaction, and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
| Metric | Description |
| CSAT | It reflects on the psychological and behavioral impacts of conversions on the customer or any other targeted audience. Generally, the satisfaction level is determined by analyzing the rating on the scale of 0-10 or by a survey/ feedback question such as “How do you feel about the overall experience with our product or services?” Additionally, the sentiment descriptors like excellent, good, poor, etc can be used for the same purpose. The choice of the method varies depending on personal preference and brand type. |
| Net Promoter Score | It is a measurement of customer brand loyalty which is considered a better evaluation method than CSAT. Largely, respondents are used by categorizing them into proper specific groups. The three broad groups are – Detractors who are rated between 0-6, passive respondents are rated at 7 or 8, and promoters, the healthy users are rated either 9 or 1O. The promoters are considered potent to turn into brand evangelists. |
| Testimonials | The testimonials are basically the customer reviews, endorsement level, feedback, or rating to analyze customer satisfaction. It leads to the development of better credibility and goodwill of the brand. Moreover, in the case of service rendering brand testimonials may refer to the ultimate application of the provided instructions and recommendations that lead to the creation of healthy differences in life. |
Scope of Social Media Metrics
Inarguably, social media is not merely an entertainment platform anymore; it is a strategic business space where ideas take a convertible shape. Since social media metrics are driven by machine learning and deep learning algorithm, therefore users receive personalized experiences and progressive business pathways on online platforms. Here, the business span has grown significantly leading to better market reach and brand visibility. With social media analytics taking a proactive shape in every business industry the use of social media metrics has grown over time. In the year 2019, over 2.95 million people were found to be actively engaged in at least one social media platform. Furthermore, the figure is expected to reach 3.43 billion by the year 2023. So, next time while establishing a marketing campaign make sure to essential social media KPIs into consideration.
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