Social media marketing is one of the most important tools you can have under your belt, and with that comes the wealth of data and analytics for you to learn from and track. There are certain metrics that are especially important to track, in order for you to see if you’re on the right path with your marketing strategy, which will inadvertently help your business grow.

Which metrics you need to track comes down to your marketing goals, but the following metrics will give you insight into your followers and their behavior when it comes to your content, as well as what aspects of your social media you should hone and improve.

Engagement

Engagement is essentially how much your followers are interacting with you and your content. This comes down to seeing how many likes, comments, reposts or shares your posts get. The higher your engagement rate, the better.

Most social networks have a pre-existing engagement tracker. Facebook’s tool is shown below:

This shows up underneath each of your posts. Upon clicking, they will show you a detailed breakdown of how many reactions, comments, shares, and clicks your post accumulated.

Meanwhile, this is what LinkedIn’s version looks like:

They break down the number of clicks and impressions your post received, and the total engagement rate is calculated with the following formula:

 

(Likes+Comments+Shares+Clicks+Follows)/Impressions

 

From here, you can pay attention to which posts are receiving higher traction, and create more content based on similar topics or formats.

 

Reach

Similar to engagement is reach. Your reach shows you how much your posts have spread throughout your chosen social media platform. This indicates things like how far your content has disseminated, and how big your audience is.

In essence, your reach is the potential amount of viewers each of your posts can get. This is usually calculated by adding up your number of followers with the follower count of the accounts who shared your posts.

 

Audience Growth

This metric is a sub-metric of reach, which measures how much your audience has grown over a certain period of time. This in turn reflects how many people you can potentially reach with your account.

Firstly, specify a period in which you want to calculate your audience growth, for example, for the past one month. In order to calculate, use this formula:

 

Number of new followers over the specified period / total followers

 

Share of Voice

The share of voice metric compares how your brand’s mentions compare to your competitors, and reflects how visible your brand is online. This is calculated by determining what percentage of the overall online conversation is held by your brand, and comparing it with your competitors to see who holds the biggest share of social voice.

To calculate your share of voice, start by getting the total number of mentions your brand has received over a specific time period. Then, add it up with your competitors’ mentions, which you can do using various social media management tools. That gives you the total number of mentions across the industry.

Follow the following formula to calculate your percentage:

 

Your brand mentions/total industry mentions x 100 = share of social voice

 

Click-Through Rate

The click-through rate measures how often people are clicking on the call-to-action links you post on online. This will show you how effective and compelling your posts are in persuading people to click on your links.

The formula to calculate click-through rates is as below:

 

Total clicks / total impressions x 100 – click-through rate

 

Cost-per-click (CPC)

The cost-per-click reflects how much you are paying for every click you receive on your sponsored posts. This is important if you are investing in your social pages. Instead of focusing on how much your total spend is, take a look at your CPC. It can determine whether it’s worth it to continue spending on ads, or if you should be investing elsewhere instead.

Here’s how to calculate your CPC:

 

Total ad spend / Total measured clicks = Cost-per-click

 

By tracking these metrics, you can have a clear outlook on your overall social media performance and see which types of posts are excelling, and which aren’t. As a result, you can tweak your marketing strategy accordingly and get those impressions and click-throughs through the roof!

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