What to Measure in Social Media Metrics

1. Level of engagement

One of the most important things that you need to measure in social media metrics is engagement. Engagement refers to the extent to which your audience participate in the discussions that you create on social media platforms. Also, engagement, in this case, implies the way people tend to share the content that you post on social media pages. For example, if you share content on Facebook, then the number of times that people use the Facebook share link feature is an essential indicator of engagement. Similarly, if you are on Twitter, then the extent to which people retweet or comment on your tweets can be used to measure the level of engagement. In social media management, you must measure engagement to tell the impact of your posts on your audience.

2. Volume

Volume is another crucial thing that is measured in social media metrics. In general, the concept of volume as it relates to social media metrics refers to the number of people who do specific things that affect your social media performance. For example, if you concentrate on determining the number of people who like your page on Facebook, then the total number of your fans is a measure of volume. Similarly, if you look at the number of impressions, of people who have read your tweet, then you will be looking at the size of your fans who interact with your content on social media pages.

It is common for some social media metrics to measure changes in volume as opposed to merely documenting the number of people who interact with content. For example, if you have 300,00 fans on your Facebook fan page, this does not mean that all these individuals actively read and engage with your content. Besides, the numbers keep on changing over time. Therefore, you must study the changes in the volume to determine trends and how they can influence your performance.

3. Reach

A straightforward way of visualizing the concept of reach as it is used in social media metrics is considering how far a tweet can spread. If you use influencers who have high numbers of people who follow them, then reach may include what the influencer, their followers and everyone else who sees the tweet do. Therefore, it is easy to use a phrase like ‘regional or global reach’ to describe the boundaries for engagement of social media content. If you have a global reach, it means that anyone in the world can access and react to your content on social media pages.

It is important to emphasize that in practice; social media metrics normally consider reach together with several other parameters. For example, when you would like to determine how influential your posts are, you need first to determine the level of engagement and then calculate the extent to which your content can spread on social media. Using these two measures, you can accurately estimate several other measures of social media SEO.

4. Conversions

Conversions is another important parameter that you can use in social media metrics. Primarily, conversions refer to the number of people who, after engaging with content on social media platforms, decide to visit the site and complete a transaction. In other words, conversion is more important than clickthrough rates. Click through rates normally indicate how people choose to visit a website. On the contrary, conversion only occurs when users complete a transaction.

There has been a raging debate about the issue of conversion in social media management for a long time. On the one hand, some observers and practitioners believe that it is wrong to measure conversion by referring to the last website that a user is before visiting the main site. The reason for this point of view is that internet users typically move about haphazardly before they visit the main page that contains the things that they are looking for. for example, if someone is looking for cat food, the person may see an advertisement of cat food on a Facebook. Before the person clicks on the advert, they may first Google something about the food. They may then visit the site by keep on checking a few images of the food back on Google or even getting distracted and reading about some cat problems on other sites. Therefore, it is difficult to measure conversion by referring to the last webpage that users visit.

In conclusion, these are some of the most critical aspects of social media metrics. You need to determine their values for you to understand the impact of your campaign on social media. Also, you need to refer to them always when crafting a social media marketing campaign.