In today’s changing digital media and entertainment landscape, businesses that are not using social media to grow their business sales are certainly missing a golden opportunity. But a strong social media presence is more than just posting some content. As a business, it is vital to monitor and study the social media metrics to identify and understand if the marketing campaign is working or not.
What Are Social Media Metrics?
Social media metrics are critical data points in social media campaigns that help in determining the impact of a campaign on a brand or revenue. Social media marketers use monitoring metrics to stay on top of the data. The goal is to gather insights on how the audience perceives a brand and what works towards improving the brand’s reputation and followers.
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Why Do Social Media Metrics Matter in Marketing?
For a business, social media metrics hold true value for revenue generation and data growth. When a post has a positive impact, it directly reflects on the business and, ultimately, the business’s bottom line. Social media metrics help in monitoring the reach of specific posts and provide insights on ways to adapt and adjust campaigns for better traction.
The digital landscape is constantly in flux, and so are the metrics important in the larger strategy. These key metrics are vital to breaking down silos with social media analytics and reporting strategy.
Social Media Engagement Metrics
Social media engagement is when a viewer interacts with a post. They can comment on it, like it, or even share it. Engagement rate is the percentage of engagements with a post per audience. For a brand, defining the target audience can be tricky as not all followers are likely to see a post, and even non-subscribers can engage with you.
To build a brand in today's digital age, social media is the ultimate weapon. It helps brands to interact and engage with their target customer base directly and explore ways to use social media engagement metrics to understand how they are performing and where to strengthen. These social media metrics are:
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Reach: To understand how many people are able to potentially see the content.
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Impressions: The number of times people have viewed or interacted with the content.
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Audience growth rate: This metric helps to identify how the audience grows rather than the audience size.
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Amplification rate: It compares the shares to the number of followers and highlights how followers are amplifying the marketing for a brand.
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Click-through rate: CTR measures the number of times an individual clicks links in the content.
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Conversion rate: This helps in comparing the conversions, including subscriptions and downloads.
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Engagement rate: This metric offers insights into interactions compared to the audience size. Many social media platforms measure engagement rates based on their followers.
But why is it important to compare engagement to audience size?
Most often, engagement is measured as a percentage of followers. The different engagement metrics range from true financially based numbers to social media-specific actions, including followers. In addition, voice-based metrics like net promoter scores or text analysis are also becoming strong indicators of success.
While a majority of social media platforms are built around a core revenue model of advertising and the sale of valuable user data, the next generation of platforms is set to push this shift forward to highlight the business value of engagement quality. The goal of every social media strategy should be to grow your followers and increase the audience reach. Examining the engagement rate as a function will help in better understanding the audience base a brand is reaching beyond its base of followers and customers. This approach will help make the platforms’ goals simple: finding users that engage with content, keeping them there at all costs while bringing in more users, and selling ads or data.
Hopefully, platforms will realize that a blind focus on engagement is not suitable for business. Brands must unlearn bad habits and broaden their perspective beyond raw engagement numbers. Engagement should be about quality, not quantity.
Read more: Data-Driven Influencer Marketing Campaign: The New Strategy for Growth
Biased and Unbiased Social Media Performance
Measuring social media performance involves tracking key metrics like engagement, impressions, shares, and conversions. Tracking the response rate and time helps in gaining a full view of the social media campaigns.
However, with this rise in popularity, there have been aggressive efforts being undertaken to police online falsehoods. Brands have to spend more time figuring out how to comply with a booming list of global regulations minimally. They are exploring new ways to create and keep content trustworthy and free from abuse. While the negative effects of online disinformation and abuse are clear, many of the largest platforms are doing just the bare minimum to keep people safe.
This entire situation boils down to a fundamental flaw in the way social media platforms have been used from the beginning - that engagement is everything.
While the most engaging content is not necessarily the best for ad conversions, it is the main revenue driver for most social platforms. But the approach needs to change.
It has become more vital than ever to create content that is transparent and engages with the user without creating a negative person. As an obligatory consequence, platforms need to be incentivized and look the other way when interactions on social media get hateful. Positive environments and experiences are stronger drivers of engagement and purchasing decisions. Better conversions lead to greater recall of information and more thoughtful consideration of new products.
Read more: AI in Marketing: An Essential Tool for Modern Marketers
Social Media Engagement Metrics for Growth
The social media landscape revolves around a balancing act of the creative and the analytical. While creativity is the icing on the cake, social media engagement metrics are the basic ingredients.
There is no one metric to measure. Marketers need to depend on a healthy blend of numerous metrics to characterize how social media impacts the entire business. The metrics that are crucial to a strategy and reporting depend on the brand, its business goals, and its strategy.
Understanding social media metrics is critical to optimizing the performance of a media campaign. These metrics provide data analytics insights about impressions and other components that further help in digging into why and how a brand can improve. The ultimate goal with metrics is to use them to calculate how to improve social media campaigns.
SG Analytics, recognized by the Financial Times as one of APAC's fastest-growing firms, is a prominent insights and analytics company specializing in data-centric research and contextual analytics. Operating globally across the US, UK, Poland, Switzerland, and India, we expertly guide data from inception to transform it into invaluable insights using our knowledge-driven ecosystem, results-focused solutions, and advanced technology platform. Our distinguished clientele, including Fortune 500 giants, attests to our mastery of harnessing data with purpose, merging content and context to overcome business challenges. With our Brand Promise of "Life's Possible," we consistently deliver enduring value, ensuring the utmost client delight.
A leading enterprise in Customer Analytics, SG Analytics focuses on leveraging cutting-edge technologies and methods to provide cutting-edge customer analytics solutions and retain your customers by preventing churn-inducing customer behaviors. Contact us today to make critical data-driven decisions and develop more effective customer engagement initiatives, leading to happier customers.
About SG Analytics
SG Analytics is an industry-leading global insights and analytics firm providing data-centric research and contextual analytics services to its clients, including Fortune 500 companies, across BFSI, Technology, Media and entertainment, and Healthcare sectors. Established in 2007, SG Analytics is a Great Place to Work® (GPTW) certified company and has a team of over 1100 employees and has presence across the U.S.A, the U.K., Switzerland, Canada, and India.
Apart from being recognized by reputed firms such as Analytics India Magazine, Everest Group, and ISG, SG Analytics has been recently awarded as the top ESG consultancy of the year 2022 and Idea Awards 2023 by Entrepreneur India in the “Best Use of Data” category.
