It’s 2018 and the average business is relying heavily on social media platforms to share their content and engage their target audiences. The only issue is that those businesses are not alone in their advertising efforts, as there are numerous other online companies trying to make an impact of their own. Not to mention that social medias boast billions and billions of active daily users and tracking your company’s success becomes a rather challenging endeavor.
But instead of waiting for the results to become apparent, companies have started tracking individual social media metrics, including followers, likes, shares, mentions in order to gain useful insight into the behavior of customers and measure the customer’s response to advertising campaign, as well as the use that newly gained information to further improve their marketing efforts.
Social media followers
Social media followers is a pretty self-explanatory metric. It tracks the number of active followers your brand has on different social media platforms, such as Google+, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Besides tracking the exact number of followers, this metric allows you track the fluctuations in your follower count over time. This helps advertisers conclude whether their marketing campaigns have had an immediate impact and how much exposure your brand has received. Clear numbers are essential when it comes to growing an audience and provide you with relevant information regarding the strength of your online presence.
Social media mentions
Tracking social media mentions means you’re tracking the number of times people have mentioned your business, whether they follow your company or not. This metric is excellent for figuring out the response to your publications, promotions, special offers and similar types of activities. Mentions, as well as the majority of similar metrics, can be tracked using social mention monitoring tools. These tools are used to follow and track any relevant conversations and monitor for specific keywords that you have previously assigned. Besides tracking your own mentions, you can also follow your competitors in order to find out whether they’re performing better or worse than you.
Social media interactions
Unlike mentions and followers, social media interactions are a metric used to measure your marketing campaign’s engagement levels. KPI or the key performance indicator for social media interactions refers to the efficiency of your advertising efforts in producing engagement with your target audience. Driving likes, shares and retweets is one thing, but with enough interaction, your posts have the potential of going viral and even shared by other media outlets, outside the internet. Improving your social media interactions is only a matter of building a relationship with your customers and engaging them on a regular basis.
Social media traffic and conversion rates
Traffic and conversion rates metrics refers to the effectiveness of your marketing efforts in generating traffic and converting followers into paying customers. This metric is rather useful when you’re trying to accurately measure your ROI regarding your advertising campaign. Social media are the number one driver of website traffic and companies rely on these metrics to calculate the exact GCR or goal conversion rate for each of the networks, isolate those that appear to be underperforming and tweak their brand messages in order to better resonate with their social media followers.
Social media platforms offer an incredible amount of value to companies, namely due to their large pools of potential customers. Despite a large number of users, most of these platforms are very business-friendly and the metrics they provide can easily be tracked and analyzed to provide valuable information regarding not only the effect of your campaign but also the satisfaction of your target audience with your brand’s performance.
