Social media metrics/analytics is a term that is often heard when talking about social media marketing, but it also a term that can be easily misunderstood by many. Simply put, social media metrics help us measure the value of our marketing efforts, it is the data gathered to assess the performance of your social media campaigns.
Between the various social media platforms, there are hundreds of metrics to analyze, making this aspect of social media marketing an easy one to get overwhelmed with. While there are many social media metrics that are universal, it is imperative to know and understand the terms in order to make the most of your social media analytics.
Whether you are new to social media metrics or are just in need of a refresher, in this post we will define the most common and important social media metrics to insure you are meeting your marketing goals!
Social Media Metrics Defined
- Key Performance Indicator (KPI):A key performance indicator, or KPI, is a metric you use to measure your progress toward business goals. In social media marketing, KPIs are the most important stats to track in order to see if you’re meeting the objectives of your social strategy.
- Brand Awareness: is the attention your brand gets—across all social media—during a reporting period, or a specific span of time that yields statistically relevant data.
- Impressions: the number of times your post was seen
- Reach: the number of people who saw your post at least once
- Potential Reach: measures the number of people who could, realistically, see a post during a reporting period.
- Reactions: the number of reactions on your post. The reactions button on an ad allows people to share different reactions to its content: Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad or Angry.
- Engagement: the number of times people interacted with your post.
- Post engagement rate: the number of engagements divided by impressions or reach. A high rate means the people who see the post find it interesting.
- Average Engagement Rate: is the number of engagement actions (e.g., likes, shares, comments) a post receives relative to your total number of followers.
- Audience Growth Rate:measures the speed at which your brand’s following increases on social media. It’s how quickly you gain followers.
- Conversion Rate: is the number of visitors who, after clicking on a link in your post,take action on a page (e.g., subscribe to your newsletter, download a gated content asset, register for a webinar) against that page’s total visitors.
- Click-Through Rate(CTR): is how often people click on the call-to-action link in your post.
- BounceRate: is the percentage of page visitors who click on a link in your post, only to quickly leave the page they land on without taking an action.
- Cost-Per-Click(CPC):is the amount you pay per individual click on your sponsored social media post.
- Cost Per Thousands Impressions (CPM): the amount you pay every time a thousand people scroll past your sponsored social media post.
- Conversation Rate: is the ratio of comments per post to the number of overall followers you have.
