As you continue to invest time and effort into building your brand’s or account's social media presence, setting goals and metrics to measure your performance on social media is important for success. When looking at your social media strategy, align your current objectives with key metrics and track your performance over time. You may be asking yourself “Where do I begin and which metrics should I consider?” Let's take a look at some of the most common social media metrics that brands and users keep track of:

1. Reach or impressions. Reach is the unique number of individuals who have seen your post, whereas impressions are the total number of times your content has been displayed. This helps brands or businesses understand how visible they may be within the social space.
2. Engagement or engagement rate. Engagement rate is a performance indicator that gauges the level of interaction and involvement of your audience with your content. It takes into consideration the number of likes, comments and shares a post receives. A higher engagement rate typically reflects a stronger connection between your audience and the content you're sharing.
3. Click-throughs or click-through rate. Click-throughs measure the percentage of your audience that clicks through to a link within your post. Brands continue to drive users to their websites or to a landing page where they can learn more or register for an upcoming event. It can be a very important number to see how many people register from your social post.
4. Follower growth. This measures the increase in your community and is important to consider if you're interested in increasing your organic reach and advocacy.

Can you match the goal to the correct metric?

When running a campaign that leverages social media as a promotional tactic to achieve specific business goals or objectives, it’s important to identify the key metrics that will help determine if you’re on track to reaching your goals. Currently, there are a variety of tools available to help you track, measure and analyze your social media campaigns.

In-platform metrics (Facebook/Instagram insights, Twitter Analytics)

Did you know that all of the large social media platforms have built-in insights or analytics that you can take advantage of? While it does require some manual pulling of reports, you are given the raw data to be able to track important metrics including engagement rate, reach, follower growth, video views and more! Most of the platforms will also share insights into when your community is most active, as well as some basic demographic information.

Social listening and engagement tools

For a monthly fee, many social media marketers will purchase access to a social media listening and engagement platform such as Sprout Social, Hootsuite or Buffer. These platforms essentially act as an all-in-one solution that allows you to plan or schedule your posts, moderate your community and track your performance for both campaigns and organic content. While there is a cost associated, the insights gained and time saved do make them worth the investment.

Google Analytics

While typically used for understanding website analytics, in recent years social media marketers have leveraged this tool to help track the traffic that is being driven from social media to their website. Leveraging this information can help you better understand the content that is driving your audience to click through and take action, as well as their behaviour after they've clicked through.

Effective social media management is closely tied to one's ability to interpret social analytics and make informed decisions to optimize their brand's social strategy. Here's a quick look at how you can achieve this while overseeing your affiliated or personal account.

Step 1: Identify your goals and key metrics that you will track.

Step 2: Regularly monitor your data, either natively within the social media platform or by leveraging a social engagement tool. If you have the bandwidth, we recommend doing this monthly to start, but at a minimum, we recommend doing this quarterly.

Step 3: Analyze patterns or trends. Are you noticing that specific themes of your posts are performing better? Are there specific times of the day when your audience is more engaged? Are certain content types (photos, videos, text) generating more reach/engagements?

Step 4: Compare platforms (if applicable). If you have more than one social channel, it may be worthwhile to compare the results from each to determine which platform is more effective for your current goals. Also, look at if there are any key differences that you can lean into for future optimizations, such as a difference in top-performing content types.

Step 5: Assess content types. Dive deep into the effectiveness of the various types of content you're sharing. Identify the top-performing content types and continue to tap into them to continue developing content that resonates with your audience.

Step 6: Apply your learning and optimize your content calendar. Revisit your content calendar and the content you've previously planned and apply key learnings such as time of day to post, or even reconsider various content types.

Step 7: Experiment! Continuously look for new and fresh ways to optimize your social media content.

Actively monitoring and interpreting social media data is an important step when it comes to optimizing your brand's social media presence. Being aware of how your content is performing enables you to remain on trend and nimble in a rapidly changing environment.