5 Social Media Metrics Your Business Needs to Track

Today, social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. It has rooted itself so deeply into our personal culture that nowadays we simply can’t imagine what life would be like without it. What’s more, business around the world are turning to social media in order to conduct their online marketing strategies. The reasons for that are pretty obvious, social media platforms have a huge reach and marketing campaigns on them are very cost-effective. Yet, a lot of businesses out there aren’t using their social media marketing optimally enough. Instead, they waste their time by focusing on the wrong kind of strategies and fall into the trap of slaving away on too many social media platforms that aren’t bringing in any results for their business whatsoever. All of this, and more, could’ve been avoided if only they kept a closer eye on their social media metrics. To not make the same mistake, be sure to check these five social media metrics which your business should keep a close track off.

1. Follower growth

First of all, you want to be tracking the rate of which you are generating new followers on various social media. This will give you a good indication of how successful your marketing strategy has been so far and also which of these platforms work best for your particular business. For example, you’ve noticed that your Twitter and Instagram profiles have a much larger following than your YouTube account. Logically, the next course of action would be to all in on these two platforms and fold on YouTube and disregard it altogether if the results are below par. Time is money, and you don’t want to waste your effort on beating a dead horse, YouTube in this case; those resources can be used to actually expand your overall reach on other more fruitful platforms.

2. Referral traffic

Referral traffic is the number of visitors your website gets from your social media accounts, generated directly through clicks on the links you’ve posted, or people have shared, on your profile. Naturally, you want to constantly be engaging and growing your social media community as much as possible. However, there comes a time when you want your tribe to move to new pastures, namely your website. By checking this metric, you’re making sure that your headlines and posts are effectively directing people to your homepage. If this is not the case, then you have to rethink your strategy and improve the quality of the content you’re posting. Otherwise, your content is just standing there looking nice; but other than that, it’s not being of much use to you.

3. Conversion rates

Increasing the traffic to your website is always a good thing, but it shouldn’t be the ultimate purpose of your marketing strategy. Your website is not an art gallery, it’s a business. You want to be converting all of those viewers into potential customers. To do this, you need to keep tabs on what your current social media conversion rates are in order to up your game and see which areas could use some improvement. The aim here is to find what kind of content is bringing you the best conversion rates out there and then focusing on producing more of the same. So using some cutting-edge media monitoring tools, to analyze precisely where these high conversion rates occur and in what volume,is definitely a good idea.

4. Engagement

Next, having a dead crowd is not just the ultimate let down on a rock concert, it plagues social media as well. Your total number of followers won’t do you any good if they’re not engaging with the content you’re posting on social media. The general definition of engagement is the number of likes, comments, shares, clicks and follows your target audience provides you with. If you have loads of followers yet only a select few of them regularly comment or share your posts then you’re not keeping track of your engagement well enough. For example, checking what is the average video retention of your followers will give you a general idea of how long your video content should be. If you’re posting thirty minute long videos and the average retention is only one minute then you need to adapt your content to that time-frame in order to get better engagement results from your followers.

5. Top influencers

Finally, one of the most popular social marketing strategies today is done by promoting your content via influencers. Being free most of the time, it’s the most cost-effective way of getting your good name out there. For this reason, you want to be monitoring who your top influencers are and then organize new campaigns around them, expanding your reach to their followers as well in the process. Likewise, you can analyze exactly which influencers didn’t bring much to the table and consider not using them any time soon. In addition, those that actually had a positive impact on your channel should be invited to participate more often.

To sum up, casually using social media to market your business will bring you some results. Optimally using social media by tracking all the relevant metrics out there, will yield you the best possible results.

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