Last week, I spoke about social media metrics and why they matter. This week, I want to give a rundown of the most important social media metrics to track and what they can tell you.

When you take into account all of the social media platforms available, along with advertising platforms and then statistics from your website, you’ll find there are hundreds of metrics to track.

This can often make things really confusing, but across many of the platforms, the same metrics are the most important:

Reach

Reach is a common metric and tracks how many unique people have seen your content. For example, if a Facebook post has a reach of 100, that means the post came up on the feeds of 100 people.

Improving the reach of your posts should always be one of your priorities when social media marketing. The more people that see your posts, the better. But it can be a bit complicated with Facebook’s ever-changing algorithm.

The golden rule is that Facebook will show people your posts when it believes they’re worth seeing and that the person wants to see them!

With that in mind, ultimately, to improve your reach, you need to make content your followers enjoy.

Engagement

Engagement is the act of a user interacting with one of your posts. That can be a reaction, comment, share, retweet, or like.

Tracking your engagement can be a great way of helping you to figure out what content your social media audience is enjoying. If you look at your posts and see that certain posts do well, you could change your strategy to make more of those posts.

We find quotes and behind-the-scenes posts pick up lots of engagement, so we do our best to post both each week. It’s what our followers enjoy.

Engagement is important because the more engaging your content, the more reach it will get. And as I mentioned, the higher your reach, the more people get to see your posts!

Clicks

So you’ve created some amazing content for your social media. It’s getting lots of engagement. A ton of people are looking at it (your reach is high!) But you must have some purpose behind all of it and that’s to get clicks.

Getting clicks on your posts is important because it takes your followers to your website (or online store) where you can gather their information or get them even more interested in your service or product. You may even be able to make a sale.

Tracking the number of people that click through to your website is important. But can get a bit complicated.

How do you know which of the following is more successful:

A. 10 clicks from a post with a reach of 2,000
B. 5 clicks from a post with a reach of 100

You may think that A is the most successful. It received more clicks and reached more people. But if you break it down a bit more, you will see that B is successful in its own way.

Of the 2,000 people that saw post A, only a measly 10 people clicked. That’s 0.5% of the users.

Whereas for post A, although only 100 people saw the post, 5% of them clicked.

This percentage is known as Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and can give another indication of how successful your post is. It’s especially important for advertising where you know that post B is the best since you can pay to enhance your reach (and thus your clicks.)

Followers

Last but not least, the most well-known measure: followers (or page likes). This needs no explanation, but it’s how many people have subscribed to your updates.

Gaining followers will help raise your reach (along with everything else) as your posts will be sent to a certain percentage of your followers. The more people that follow you, the higher your reach and as I’ve said, that equals more people to convert into sales.

The best way to use these metrics is to keep track of them over time. They all work together and effect each other. By looking over time, you can find what works and what doesn’t so you plan future strategy. It will depend on your ultimate end goal as to what you want to focus on.

If you need help with your social media marketing, whether it’s understanding your analytics or help with increasing your reach, take a look at our social media marketing services.