Social media engagement is defined as the overall likes, share, and comments and in some platforms, it also includes any time someone sees your posts and stops scrolling to read or watch your content. Measuring social media engagement is becoming much easier by the day. Social media has become an easy platform to work with for marketers and business owners. There are dozens of social media metrics that you can track to help you determine the level of engagement you receive from any of your posts. Also, there are numerous tools to calculate everything and offer a report weekly, monthly, or yearly. Below are 5 ways to measure social media engagement.

What Social Media Metrics Should You Track?

1. Likes, Shares, and Comments

This involves keeping track of the number of likes and shares your posts receive. Anytime a follower or social media user likes your post either in text, picture, or video format social media platforms keep a record and you can see it on the post directly or in a report. Also, when your followers like your post and feel others need to see it and shares it on their timeline, that record is also kept as a share or retweet. These two metrics tell you if your audience loved what you shared or not. So, you can measure what content is right for your audience with these metrics. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter give you a very detailed report of how your post is performing through their insights or analytics tools.

2. Follower Growth

Keeping an eye on the number of followers gained over a period of time is another metric that helps measure engagement. So, track the number of new followers you have acquired each month. If you are receiving followers at a fast rate, you know that your business is doing good and if it’s vice versa, you know that something is not right. Kranz (2020) says that if you have 4,000 followers and you are following 400 only, it means that the content you are providing is important and is attracting people to your page. Tools like Twitter Analytics are very helpful in keeping track of follower growth rate. Another great tool is Dashboard180 that not only gives you a monthly record of your followers but immediately you get a new follower and also keeps an eye on your competitors progress. You will know when your competitor is doing better than you.

3. Awareness

Social media awareness is measured by tracking impressions and reach. Social media has advanced and will give you a record of impressions and reach each of your post has. Maybe you don’t know what impressions and reach are or mean. Impressions are the number of times a post appears in a followers or social media user’s timeline (Zarzycki, 2018). Social media reach refers to the unique viewers your post gets. Whenever posts receive high impression, reach and engagement rate then it can be considered as a major achievement and in instances when the numbers are very high it can mean you went viral.

4. Clicks Per Post

Clicks per post apply when you have shared your website or third-party blog content on social media. Here, you will measure the number of times social media users clicked on the links you shared. It is an effective measure of whether your brand message on your website is relevant for your target audience. It is a means to determine the amount of traffic you get from your social media efforts. The click per post will help you reorganize your content or posting behavior or realign your brand message if it doesn’t fit your audience.

5. Audience Demographics

Most businesses despite being online may be unable to supply their products and services to the entire nation. With new analytics tools, these businesses can collect useful data about their followers including gender, age, geographic location and their interests. This is a very important metric for any business because the main aim to go online is to meet the right audience and sell to them. Using Twitter analytics, you can get all the details you need to target the right population or customers and with the right message.

Other important metrics to measure include return on investment, lead generation, and mentions among others. Please share with us other metrics that businesses need to be tracking on social media.

References

Kranz, J.(2020, June 30). 7 social media engagement metrics for tracking followers. Buffer Resources. https://buffer.com/resources/measure-social-media-engagement/

Zarzycki, N.(2018, June 26). Reach vs. impressions: What’s more important to track? Social Media Marketing &Management Dashboard. https://blog.hootsuite.com/reach-vs-impressions/

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