The only way to know whether your social media marketing efforts are helping you to achieve your short and long term business goals is to track a range of key performance metrics.
Here are 10 metrics that will enhance your marketing reports and inform all future strategic decision making processes.
Content Metrics
Understanding how well your content is performing will help you to refine your posting schedule and create content that your audience wants to engage with. For example, you might currently post image-based content 25% of the time, text-based content 15% of the time and video-based content 60% of the time, however, a different ratio might enhance engagement and boost the interactions you are having with your audience.
Timing Metrics
To attain the best possible levels of engagement, you need to know precisely when your audience is browsing social media and what they’re looking for in order to successfully tailor your posting schedule accordingly.
Audience Metrics
Although building a strong social following is important, you also need to ensure that your content is attracting your target audience to give you the best chance to positively impact your leads, sales and conversions.
Social Listening Metrics
Social listening goes beyond simply tracking mentions and takes a closer look at the content and context of the conversations people are having about your brand. This information can be used in a variety of ways, including addressing any potential customer service issues.
Competition Metrics
Although it is never wise to copy what your competition is doing, understanding which strategies are and aren’t working well for them will help you to hone your approach and to develop fresh strategies and tactics.
Engagement Metrics
If you want to increase your likes, shares or follower count, ensuring that you first have a detailed understanding of the engagement your efforts are currently securing is essential. From here, you should be able to identify which posts are performing well, which will help you to effectively adjust your overall social strategy.
Social Media Traffic Metrics
If social media is a significant driver of traffic to your website, take a look at your social visitors’ bounce rate and monitor their journey around your site. Do they sign up to your mailing list or spend any amount of time clicking through several pages? This information can be used in a variety of ways, including helping you to tailor your copy and refine your internal linking structures.
Branding Metrics
Maintaining a consistent and clear brand voice is essential, so it is important to ensure that every image uses a similar filter and every caption is written in a voice that clearly belongs to your brand.
Social Media Management Metrics
Social media marketing is an extremely valuable business tool and ensuring that your channels are well-managed is crucial. You need to know how often reporting is carried out, how quickly messages are replied to and, where relevant, how any PR issues were handled.
Goal Metrics
Understanding whether your data aligns with the goals you have for each social channel is key to increasing conversions and generating a decent return on investment (ROI) from your social efforts.
Comprehensive social audits delve much deeper than surface-level metrics, which will equip you with the information you need to put your business on the path to social success.
