Track Social Media Metrics That Really Matter

Knowing the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaign is all about tracking data. On the surface, this might mean looking at the amount of "likes" a Facebook post gets or the number of retweets your latest Twitter effort has gotten. This is fine if you're just taking a quick glance at your campaign to get an idea of how popular your brand is, but there is much more to tracking a campaign than that.In order to find out if your social media marketing campaign is truly successful, you need to take a look at the metrics that truly matter, the ones that go beyond the vanity data that likes and retweets provide. Here's what some of those metrics are and how you can better track them.

The Social Funnel

Before we talk more about the various social media metrics that you should be watching, let's talk about where each of them lies within the social funnel. The social funnel is a way to identify important social media metrics and fit them into different categories.The first of these categories is awareness, or the metrics that illuminate your current and potential audience. The second category is repeat visibility. This category shows how your audience is interacting with your content such as whether they interact on Facebook, retweets or via email. The third category is engagement and sales, which will show you how effective your social media strategy really is. It refers to how much of your potential audience is converted into actual sales as opposed to the ones who simply view your ads and posts before moving on. The final category is consumer. This refers to not just how many of your audience members purchase your product and become customers, but what they truly think about your brand.Each of these categories has its own set of metrics that need to be measured if you really want to know how effective your social media marketing strategy really is. With that being said, let's take a closer look at some of these metrics.

Awareness Metrics

The first metric that you should be measuring is brand awareness. Simply put, this is how many people have been made aware of your brand through social media. This includes mentions of your brand, shares, likes, and some more of the "surface level" interaction on social media. It's relatively easy to track, but you may want to invest in a good brand monitoring tool if you want to accurately measure the awareness of your business's brand. We particularly love Social Report because their reporting is customizable, meaning you can review something short and understandable if you're just getting started, or something more comprehensive if you know you need lots of data.

Audience growth rate refers to how quickly you gain followers. It's essentially how many new people become attracted to your brand and start following you on social media. The best way to monitor this is to keep track of how many new subscribers you get on Facebook or any other social media platform you choose to use in a given period, usually one fiscal year. This is much easier to track than brand awareness since social networks will give you the number of people who are subscribed to your official accounts at any given time.As for post reach, this is merely the number of people who have viewed a given post since it has gone live. As with growth rate, this is easy to track. More importantly, it's easy to track how many people see a post at any given time. For example, you might find that a post will reach more people if you post it around noon than if you post it in the late afternoon or evening. This is invaluable information that you can use to maximize the number of people who see what you have to post.

Visibility and Engagement

The best way to determine how engaged your audience is with your content is to determine your applause rate. This refers to the number of positive reactions your content receives, such as Facebook "likes" or Twitter retweets. To determine your applause rate, simply take the number of likes or other positive reactions that your content receives, divide it by the number of your total followers, and multiply that number by 100.You can also get a good idea of how well your audience is engaging with your content by studying your amplification rate. Amplification rate is a term that was coined by the digital marketing expert Avinash Kaushik and refers to the rate at which a brand's followers share their content. You can determine your amplification rate by dividing the number of shares your content receives by the number of your followers and multiplying the result by 100, much like you would find your applause rate.

Sales and Consumer Metrics

The two most important sales and consumer metrics are your conversion rate and your click-through rate. Your conversion rate refers to the number of people who take some kind of action after clicking on your content. This action could be buying your products, subscribing to your email newsletter, or otherwise doing something that implies that they will continue to do business with you. The best way to monitor this is to create a call-to-action link that places a "cookie" on the user's machine. This will help to track the number of people who click the link. Divide the number of people who clicked the link by the number of visitors, and multiply that number by 100. Keep in mind that your conversion rate can be high even if you don't have a lot of traffic going to your site. The two numbers are not mutually exclusive.As for the click-through rate, this refers to the number of people who clicked your call-to-action link. This is different from those who actually converted into customers, although the number should be similar. This is relatively easy to track, and it will give you an idea of how many people really want to do business with you as opposed to those who simply visit your site or social media page before moving on.These are really only some of the metrics that you can monitor as part of your social media campaign. As always, implementing a good social media strategy takes a lot of work, so don't settle simply for looking at the number of views that your page receives. You need to not only know how many people are seeing your content, but how they are interacting with it. Monitor this data closely, and don't hesitate to make changes if you think a different advertising strategy will result in greater user engagement.