Social media metrics to assess social media marketing performance

Various types of social media metrics that can be used to assess brands’ social media marketing performance.

Social reach

Most companies track the social reach of their social marketing activities in order to understand how their social posts are faring. This metric reveals the number of users to whom the company’s social posts are reaching; higher the social reach more is the exposure to the posted content.

Nike has 151 million followers on its Instagram account, and its best performing posts garner 5 to 10 million views. However, there are many posts that get a few hundred thousand likes, something the company would definitely want to improve upon.

Engagement

This metric shows the number of people who are interacting with the content posted by the company on social media. More engagement usually means that the brand understands the audience better and is connecting well with them.

Using videos is a popular way to improve engagement, and while the YouTube links of a video can be shared on other social media sites, for certain sites like FB, it is best to upload the videos directly on their platform (instead of sharing the YouTube link). For example, Benefit Cosmetics posts several videos on Facebook directly that demonstrate how to use its various products, and this strategy helps them get better engagement.

Conversion

A conversion due to social marketing means that a visitor on the company’s social media channel also headed to the company’s website and bought something from the website, in the same visit.

Businesses use several strategies to improve their social media conversion, and that includes using A/B testing of their social landing pages that includes testing by changing different elements such as link placement, image size, etc. Videos in general work well on social media, and ecommerce platform BigCommerce was able to increase its social media conversions by almost three hundred percent by using video in one of their Facebook ad campaigns.

Click-through rate (CTR)

CTR is the ratio of the number of clicks that the posted content receives to the total number of impressions that the content receives. For example, the ratio of how many clicked on the link in a social media advertising to how many viewed the ad. Higher the ratio, better is the conversion.

In order to improve CTR, it is important for businesses to narrow the target audience based on various demographic factors such as language, country (even cities if applicable) so that the company can reach to the right set of people which will help improve the CTR for their social ads.

Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

This metric shows the amount that a company pays per individual click for their sponsored posts on social media. Lower the CPC, the more economical and efficient is the ad spending for the company. While brands engage in social media marketing, they use both organic as well as paid ways to increase its reach on social media. When advertising on the top social media sites, brands should focus on tracking the CPC instead of just focusing on their total spend.