Social Media Metrics You Should Know For Your Business
Metrics are important for any business. They indicate how well your company is performing and show where improvements can be made.
Social media metrics are different than a lot of other metrics in that they're not always easily quantifiable or even very concrete at all.
In fact, many social media outlets don't give you access to your own data at all! However, there are some great tools out there that make social media metrics easier to track.
Here's what I recommend looking at when evaluating your brand's performance on each platform:
Number of Friends or Followers
The number of followers you have is not a good metric. This is because the number of people who follow you on social media doesn't mean anything if they're not interacting with your content.
Instead, focus on the number of people interacting with your posts and how much engagement each piece of content receives. You can figure out this information by looking at the amount of comments, likes, or shares for each post.
If there aren't many comments or likes on one post but several other posts have lots of interactions from other users, then it's probably a good sign that something went wrong in the process (like posting at an off-time).
Number of Likes
The number of likes is a good indicator of how many people are engaged with your content. It’s also a good measure of how well your content is performing, as well as an indication of how many people are interested in what you have to say.
For example, if someone sees one of your posts and decides not to like it because it didn't resonate with them, then there's still something valuable that can be gleaned from that interaction: it shows you which topics aren't resonating with your audience and gives you an opportunity to dig deeper into why that might be so.
This metric can also help you determine whether or not the content that worked in the past continues to work today. Or if perhaps it has stopped working altogether. If this happens (and assuming there isn't anything significant going on behind-the-scenes), then chances are good that something needs changing!
Open Rate
Open rate is the percentage of people who open your email. If you have a low open rate, it means that your email is not interesting enough to make the recipient take time out of their day to read it and respond. If you have a high open rate, it means that your email is interesting enough for them to want to spend some time reading it and responding.
If you are sending out marketing emails or newsletters, this metric is essential for measuring how effective your content is at attracting readers and encouraging them to interact with the content on offer in some way - whether that be clicking through links or replying with feedback/questions etc.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
A click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click on a link in your post. It is a key metric that helps you to understand if your content is engaging enough to make people want to click through it. If you have a high CTR, it means that your content is interesting enough for people to want to read more and find out more about whatever it is that you are offering them.
The higher the CTR, the more successful your content is at attracting readers. If you have a low CTR, it means that people aren’t clicking through to read more of your content and are instead ignoring it altogether or simply leaving your site without engaging with anything else on the page.
Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who land on your site and leave without clicking or scrolling past the first page. This metric is important because it tells you how well you're doing at engaging visitors and keeping them on your site.
If your bounce rate is high, it means that most of your visitors aren't staying long enough to view multiple pages—or even one! A high bounce rate could indicate that there's something wrong with the way your website looks or what information it's providing. It could also mean that you need more compelling content to keep people reading.
If, on the other hand, your Bounce Rate is low (less than 50%), then congratulations—you've got a great-looking website that loads quickly and provides useful information!
Engagement Rate
Instead of looking at the raw number of likes or comments a post receives, engagement rate is a more accurate way to measure how engaged your audience is.
It's also a good way to gauge the quality of your followers: if you have 100 followers and 20% interact with each post, there's a good chance that 20% of those 100 people are fake profiles made by bots.
Customer Hold Time
Customer hold time is the amount of time it takes for a customer to reach a live person.
It's simple enough, but there are some hidden details you should know about this metric and how it affects your business.
The average customer spend on hold is seven minutes, with some customers spending more than 20 minutes on hold before they're connected with an agent.
Only 5% of customers hang up before reaching an agent; however, that number jumps dramatically when the wait time exceeds five minutes—it then jumps to 20%. When the hold time exceeds 15 minutes, 42% of callers hang up before reaching an agent.
42% of people who have been transferred from one department to another will eventually hang up before speaking with someone in either department (this can include being transferred from billing/customer service back into sales).
Direct Messaging and Comments
Direct messaging and comments are two of the most important social media metrics you should know. They're also related: when you use direct messaging to reach out to customers, they may reply with a comment on your page.
Commenting is an easy way for customers to interact with your business and share their views on products or services offered by your company. Social media managers can use these conversations as opportunities to gather feedback from customers, which helps them improve their strategies in the long run.
Use these metrics to see how your social media performance is.
Social media metrics are the key to understanding how your social media performance is. If you want to see if your social media marketing is working, look for trends over time and compare yourself to competitors.
Here are some of the most important metrics:
Audience growth: Number of followers, fans, or subscribers over a period of time
Engagement rate: Percentage of total followers who engage with a post (likes/comments/shares)
Reach: Total number of people exposed to content (reach can be defined many ways)
Use these metrics to get an overall picture of how well your efforts are paying off.
Conclusion
We know you’re probably wondering: “How do I measure all this stuff?” Well, we have a few suggestions for you. First, download a free tool like HootSuite (which lets you schedule posts and track engagement) or Buffer (which allows users to schedule posts across multiple social media platforms).
Second, look into the various analytics tools offered by Twitter (and other social media sites).
Thirdly—and most importantly—stay informed about what your competition is doing on these networks so that when it comes time for them to post something new on their feed/page/, you can be ready to jump on the opportunity and beat them at their own game.
If you'd like to get an audit to see how your social media metrics stack up against your competition, check out our customized content marketing plan service which includes a comprehensive audit of your social media accounts and a detailed analysis of how you can improve your strategy.