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Read MoreThe Changing Paradigm of Facebook Metrics
Like many Facebook users before, businesses also used to have a simple approach to the number of likes, comments, and shares before progressing considerably. And yes, while these measures still are relevant – they never would be able to provide the picture on how your social networks marketing translates into business engagement.
In fact, it is dangerous to get overexcited with likes. A large amount of likes does not guarantee that there will be higher sales, more customer loyalty, or increase in brand value. It is time to move from easy metrics of visibility towards those that make sense in the context of customers and their needs, as well as business goals and performance across all marketing channels.
Key Social Media Metrics to Track for Business Success
These are the most useful social media metrics that will help you in assessing the real power of your campaigns on social media platforms:
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is defined as the measure of the saturation of users in content and the degree of interaction between target audience and online content. Retweets are registered as an action performed only once, whereas engagement rate includes several actions such as comments, shares, clicks and reactions, in this case, the Instagram engagement rate.
It is computed by dividing the entire interactions (likes, comments they made, shares they performed) with the number of the followers or the impressions in form of a percentage which indicates how the audience responded to the content.
Take for instance a post that has been liked by 100 followers from a total of 10,000 which means that the engagement rate is only 1 percent while a post that is only liked by 50 followers out of 500 has an engagement rate of 10 percent. Clearly, a more engaged audience is evident from the higher engagement rate. Through such metrics, businesses can measure and evaluate the kinds of content that works best with their target audience and bear in mind any necessary changes.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The percentage of the users that visit the link within your social media business post to your website, landing page, product page, etc. is what is known as click-through rate. CTR is a devoted measure of how effective a CTA is and how effective the integration of social media is towards visiting the given site.
Let’s say, for example, one of your promotional posts included a direct link to the product page of your e-commerce website, and you had about 1,000 people viewing that post and 100 people clicked on your link, this means you have a 10% click through rate. A good click through rate means that there is relevance between the social media messages and the audience’s expectations and that your message prompts people to act as needed. Monitoring this indicator is crucial for the organizations that seek to convert social media engagement into tangible leads or sales.
Conversion Rate
Every marketer understands that conversions are the key to success. The metric known as Conversion rate indicates the percentage of users who cover a desired target action after an exposure to a social media post the brand made — such as subscribing to a newsletter, downloading a resource, purchasing something or filling out a contact form.
Hence, if you are using social media ads or running sales campaigns, the conversion rate will describe how many of the interested users have been converted into clients by your content or ad. Conversions are the only way one can track the actual ROI as opposed to just tracking likes or even visits to the website.
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Reach and Impressions
Engagement and conversion also have their importance and relevance but what reach and impressions will offer you are much more basic viewpoints about how far your posts were seen. For example, Reach is the total count of unique users who viewed a particular content, whereas impressions indicate the number of times the content has been displayed irrespective of whether or not it has been clicked on.
These two metrics will assist you in assessing how often your content has been viewed and whether the correct audience was reached with your posts. Brand awareness and widening an audience are the definite two elements that make it imperative to stress the importance of reach and impressions. It is good when a large and high reach and impressions are coupled with high engagement rates, this means that your content is viewed by many but the targeted audience which is impressive.
Customer Satisfaction and Sentiment
The overall sentiment of the audience on social media networks towards your brand whether it be negative, positive, or neutral is very important. If you pay attention to the comments, reviews, and mentions of your brand on social media, you can obtain insights about the overall impression that the public has for your company. There exist such programs, like sentiment analysis software, that allow tracking audience reactions to whether the brand’s audience was positively, negatively or mixed. Such information allows adjusting content or customer service as applicable.
This metric in relation to audience sentiment is very crucial for brand equity as negative commentary is addressed. Because of this, brand assets are safeguarded and any attacks on them may be constricted to a certain period. Determining sentiment will also assist you in enhancing your connection with the audience and nurtures them to be extensive loyal patrons over time.
Video Views and Engagement
Video views and engagements are some of the key performance indicators that have to be watched over particularly as video content continues to increase demand in the social media marketing space. There are various metrics for videos, including views and watch and share times that help one understand the audience’s interactions in regard to video content quite well. This is very critical for firms that promote their products through video commercials, new releases, and educating the audience or even sharing the making of the video.
Video, for instance, also works pretty well as a tool as higher video watch time and engagement shows that your audience is engaging with the content and that is beneficial as it may help enhance brand trust and loyalty. As a matter of fact, video content is one of the most popular and effective types of content to engage with users on social networks, and a social media marketing agency like Red Dash Media will assist in producing and optimizing video campaigns to enhance engagement and conversion.
Conclusion: Metrics that Matter Apart from the Likes
At Red Dash Media, we appreciate and understand the fact that there is a need to be more in-depth in how we measure success on social media as compared to simply counting likes. Businesses need to focus on different key engagement areas like the engagement rates, conversion rates, reach, audience growth, and the sentiment to be able to clearly understand their social media in terms of effectiveness.
Instead, if your goal is brand awareness, brand traffic or increasing sales, the metrics that you should follow are not the metrics achievable but the ones which will meet your business objectives.
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