A Brief Guide To Social Media Engagement & Awareness Metrics

Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and many other websites and platforms are familiar to practitioners and analysts.

Data collected from social channels are used to support business decisions and track the performance of actions based on those decisions, a practice known as social media metrics. Insights gathered from these analytics are leveraged by organizations for creating better marketing campaigns.

Likes, following, retweets, previews, clicks, and impressions received from particular channels are not included in social media statistics. Unlike marketing campaign support platforms like LinkedIn or Google Analytics, it provides unique reporting. 

Social media metrics employs specially created software platforms similar to search engines. Search queries or web ‘crawlers’ that cross channels are used to retrieve information about keywords or themes. Text fragments are returned, loaded into a database, categorized, and evaluated to draw valuable insights.

The variety of ways you can interpret the data when peeling back the layers of your digital marketing campaign is one of the most enjoyable aspects. To make crucial business decisions and improve user engagement, you and your team need a thorough understanding of everything that can be measured on social media.

 What are the most important metrics? How do you figure them out? Learning what to measure, how to measure it, and where each metric lives can be complex. 

However, suppose you understand how to assess your social data correctly. In that case, you may establish yourself as your company’s social metric expert, teaching your team and superiors how to go beyond the more common vanity metrics.

What is the use of social media metrics?

The concept of social listening is included in social media analytics. Listening entails keeping an eye on social media for issues and possibilities. Listening is usually included in more thorough reporting that includes listening and performance analysis in social media analytics solutions. Companies may utilize social media metrics to address these issues and use them to

• Observe trends in offerings and brands
• Recognize what is being said and how it is being received in talks
• Determine how customers feel about products and services, and explore areas to increase customer satisfaction with the brand
• Observe how people react to social media and other forms of communication
• Determine which elements of a product or service are most valuable
• Research what your competitors are saying and how effective their claims are
• Research what your competitors are saying and how effective their claims are
• Analyse the impact of third-party partners and channels on performance

These insights can be utilized to make tactical changes, such as responding to an angry tweet. Still, they can also be used to guide strategic decisions. Social media metrics is now “being pushed into the core debates about how firms establish their strategies,” according to IBM. Developing a goal is the first step in effective social media analytics. 

The objectives can range from raising income to identifying customer challenges. Topics or keywords can then be chosen, and characteristics such as a date range. Responses to YouTube videos, Facebook dialogues, Twitter debates, Amazon product evaluations, and news site comments require citations. Choosing relevant sources for a specific product, service, or brand is critical.

A data set is typically created to support the goals, themes, parameters, and sources. Visualizations are used to retrieve, analyze, and report data, making it easier to understand and change.

Marketers used to be more concerned with collecting as much data as possible rather than focusing on the correct data. In today’s data-saturated world, your social media marketing team must intelligently choose which metrics to collect to demonstrate the value of your brand’s approach. 

You’ll need to undertake some social media analysis to make your digital approach more efficient and effective. This post goes through all of the essential metrics that your team should think about. Our social media professionals lay out each metric and any formulae that go with it to better understand social media metrics.

What are the KPIs to measure social engagement?

1. Engagement Rate: Out of how many times the content was viewed and how many times a post interacted with. (Note: If the sharing isn’t available on the platform, such as Instagram, it won’t be included.) Video views rather than impressions also separate YouTube.
2. Total Clicks – A click anywhere on a post (enlarge image, hashtag, URL, user handle, etc.) 
3. Link Clicks – Clicks specific to a URL (occasionally need to use a link shortener if URLs and links aren’t available, such as on LinkedIn)
4. View Rate: The Number of times a video is viewed for 3 seconds or more (except if using a 10-second video view) out of all the videos is considered. 
5. Click-Through Rate – How many times a link in a post was clicked compared to how many times the URL was viewed. 

What are the KPIs to measure social awareness?

1. Impressions – Number of times a post was seen (not unique)
2. Organic Impressions – Number of times a post was seen (except paid promotion)
3. Paid Impressions – Number of times a post was seen because of paid promotion
4. Viral Impressions – Number of times a post was seen because of shares of the post

5. Reach – Unique Number of people who saw a post
6. Followers / Fans – Unique Number of people following your page – they’re part of your audience.
7. Frequency – Number of times each user saw one of your ads. Impressions ÷ Reach

What are the KPIs to measure success of paid campaigns?

1. CPM (cost per 1,000 views) – The cost of 1000 people seeing your ad

(Spend*1000) ÷ Impressions

2. CPC (cost per click) – Refers to the price of each click one makes on your link

Spend ÷ Clicks

3. CPE (cost per engagement) – The cost of any engagement with the post (likes, comments, shares, photo views, button clicks, etc.)

Spend ÷ Engagements

4. CPR (cost per result) – The average cost per result from your ads (link clicks, engagement, video views, etc.)

Spend ÷ Results

5. ROAS (Return on ad Spend) – It refers to how much profit you made from your paid advertising investment

Dollars made ÷ Dollars spent

6. CPA (Cost per conversion) – How much you are spending per conversion

Spend ÷ Conversions

7. CPI (Cost per install) – How much you are spending per mobile app install

Spend ÷ Mobile app installs.

Conclusion

Companies may stay updated about the latest from competitors by monitoring and analyzing unstructured data and customer interactions and behaviors to increase engagement and launch better marketing campaigns. One of Europe’s largest supermarkets studied social media conversations about its main competitor’s home delivery service to learn about its primary customers, their described service, and their “degree of trust” in the company. 

Organizations can use social media metrics to understand their target audience better and rise up to meet expectations. To provide insight and assist its clients’ ad strategies more effectively, an American gaming and media streaming website employed social media analytics to evaluate and define the segments of its audience most interested in different sorts of video games.

True, social media data is a jumbled mess. Its content includes text and slang, jargon, acronyms, abbreviations, photos, GIFs, video, and connections to other content—all of which can be classified as unstructured data, which can be classified as unstructured data notoriously tricky to manage. There’s also a lot of it: We Are Social’s annual digital report estimates over 2.3 billion users (active on social media) across the various networks. Well, that’s something to get started with!