If you’re using social media for your business, you should be measuring it. When analyzing metrics, it is good to know exactly what to look for. Measure your social activities so that you can learn what’s successful, what isn’t, and what can be improved.

Analyze the follower engagement, growth and reach to help determine the next steps when planning content promotions and new product features. What metrics to track, depends on your social media efforts. Are you solely utilizing social media as a customer service platform? Then you would want to measure response rate, engagement, etc. To generate more sales? Measuring sentiment, click-through-rate and reach will allow you to get the most out of your content and social media ads.  Most of these insights can be found natively within the soclal media platform. Here are the essential metrics that are best to monitor in any situation.

  • Volume – Volume is a great initial indicator of interest. It’s important to measure the number of messages about your brand, as well as the number of people talking about your brand, and track how both of those numbers change over time.
  • Reach – Reach measures the spread of a social media conversation. On its own, reach can help you understand the context for your content. How far is your content disseminating? How big is the audience for your message?
  • Engagement – One of the most important metrics. How are people participating in the conversation about your brand? What are they doing to spread your content and engage with the topic?
  • Followers – Surprisingly this is the least important metric. Analyzing your follower growth is helpful however, you want followers who will interact with your content and engage with your brand. Quality over quantity.

These are just the basics! You can dive into other metrics such as impressions, cost per result, video engagement, etc. depending the campaign goal. This is why monitoring and measuring your social media activities is so important – you need reliable and consistent analytics that help you track your success on valuable social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.