It might surprise you to know how many marketers don’t think past the data found on the ‘Overview’ tab when measuring their social media strategies.
Even though it’s important to keep track of those stats (that’s why they’re right up front), doing a deeper dive will yield more valuable insight.
Check out the top social media platforms and find out what social media metrics you should track for each to boost brand awareness and increase social media ROI.
Facebook Metrics – The Basics
According to Statista, Facebook (owned by parent company Meta) remains the most popular social networking site despite competition from TikTok and YouTube. In order to grow and engage your business, you need to use Facebook analytics. Facebook offers a variety of highly targeted and broad reach advertising options for businesses.
Facebook Engagement
The number of clicks, shares, comments, or reactions on your post indicates engagement.
Getting to know what types of posts your audience engages with will help inform your content strategy. Better engagement also helps your posts reach more of your followers.
Facebook Reach
Facebook’s algorithm has changed over the years, which makes it harder for messages to be seen organically. Reach indicates the number of people who have seen your post. Therefore, even if a business has many followers on Facebook, it doesn’t mean that its posts will be seen by them all.
Reach information can be found on the ‘Overview’ tab of your Facebook Insights page, while more details can be found on the ‘Reach’ tab.
Facebook Impressions
It is important to note that reach refers to the number of people who saw your post, while impression refers to how many times your post was viewed. An individual who sees the same post three times represents an increase in reach of one and an increase in impressions of three.
Click on the ‘Posts’ tab and choose ‘Impressions: Organic/Paid’ from the drop-down menu to see your ad impressions.
By dividing your impressions by your reach, you will get your frequency metric, which is the average number of times your ad was seen by each person.
Facebook Page Like & Followers
A Facebook like and a follow are important metrics for measuring your audience. Likes are people who have identified themselves as fans of your page, whereas followers indicate that they would like to see your posts in their newsfeeds (although this isn’t guaranteed by the algorithm).
Keep track of your audience size to make sure you aren’t losing more fans than you are gaining
Instagram Metrics – The Basics
According to Business of Apps, over two billion people use Instagram once a month. For brands looking to drive brand awareness and engagement, especially among those over 35 years of age, Instagram can be a powerful platform with a new focus on video formats. Here are the key metrics you need to watch with Instagram analytics.
Instagram Impressions
The number of times your post was seen by your audience. Instagram analytics breaks down this data further by showing impressions that came from hashtags, home, or profile. Good hashtags will help improve your post impressions.
Instagram Reach
A key metric to gauge campaign effectiveness on Instagram is reach, which refers to the number of unique users or accounts that saw your post.
Instagram Content Interactions
In this section, you can see how people interact with your content, including likes, comments, shares, saves, and replies.
Instagram Explore
Explore allows Instagram users to find new, relevant content from accounts they aren’t following right now. Instagram’s algorithm curates content based on similar accounts and content interacted with, including photos, videos (for more information about IG video formats), reels, and stories. Insights on Instagram will indicate how many users you reached through the feature who aren’t following you now.
Instagram Accounts Reached & Accounts Engaged
Accounts reached shows how many unique accounts have seen your content at least once and includes social media demographics such as top countries, top cities, top age ranges, and gender.
It provides a breakdown (like above) of the number of unique accounts that have interacted with your content.
Next Level Social Media Metrics
In order to quantify how well your social media strategy is performing from an awareness, engagement, and customer satisfaction standpoint, you can dig deeper and formulate digital marketing KPIs with some extra digging and calculation. Here are five metrics you should keep track of for social media marketing at the next level.
1. Follower Growth Rate
Consequently, brands can expect to see a proportionate increase in their social media audience as internet access continues to grow worldwide. It is therefore important to quantify the rate at which your brand gains followers, as well as compare your growth rate to those of your competitors.
When your social media audience growth rate flattens, it may indicate that you need to take action to reverse the trend. Instead of asking “How much is our audience growing?”, ask “How fast is our audience growing?”
Divide your net follower growth on all platforms by your total audience on all platforms and multiply that by 100 (to get your audience growth rate).
Consider doing the same calculation on your competitors’ social media platforms for comparison.
2. Social Share of Voice
The Social Share of Voice (SSoV) measures how visible, relevant, and ‘top of mind’ your brand is within your industry and in relation to your competitors.
Using your handle or name, measure all direct and indirect mentions of your brand across all social media platforms during a month. The process can be streamlined with social media monitoring and analytics tools.) Do the same for your competitors. For your share of voice percentage, divide your total mentions by the total mentions of all brands (including your own) and multiply it by 100.
3. Amplification Rate
Essentially, it measures your audience’s willingness to be associated with your brand by measuring the number of shares per post to the number of overall followers.
Amplification rates are calculated by dividing a post’s number of shares by your total number of followers, and then multiplying by 100 for a percentage.
4. Virality Rate
There is more to measuring a post’s quality than its number of likes and shares. By calculating how much of a post was shared out of the total number of times it was displayed, one can determine how viral it was. Using the following formula, the virality rate is calculated: the total number of shares is divided by the total number of impressions.
Assume that one post received 400 likes, but was shared by 2,000 of the 20,000 people who saw it. This shows more potential than another post that received 1,000 likes, but was only shared by 2,000 of the 200,000 people who saw it.
5. Social sentiment
When people talk about your brand online, do they say positive or negative things? Social share tracks your share of the conversation on social media.
Talkwalker, for example, can process and categorize context and language to calculate social sentiment.
