Social Media Metrics are Boring, But They Mean Some Shit

If you're just starting out on your social media marketing journey, well... you've got a way to go. But there's no point marketing online without understanding how to measure the success of your Facebook marketing campaigns, and this is where your metrics come in. Let's take a look through the key social media metrics that you'll need to understand before you can start weighing up your marketing strategies.

Engagements

Engagements refer to every occasion when a user simply engages with your post or content. This means likes, comments, shares and retweets, or clicks. It could also refer to organic mentions, i.e. when your brand is @mentioned in a post that isn't part of a reply to you. High engagement rates are a good sign that your online following is healthy and that your followers are active, meaning they didn't simply 'like' your page and then log out of Facebook for the next decade.

Awareness

Impressions and reach are two metrics which can help you track, effectively, how visible your brand is online. Impressions track how many times a post has shown up in someone's timeline, while reach is the potential number of viewers your post could have, which usually means your follower count plus the follower count of anyone who's shared the post. It's important to understand both what awareness means in its own right and how it works in tandem with other metrics. For example, having a high awareness score is great if you're looking to increase brand visibility, but a high awareness score combined with a low engagement score - very few likes and comments - might indicate that your posts aren't doing their job.

Share of Voice

Share of Voice basically refers to how big a share of your market your brand has. For example, how many people are discussing one UK ice cream brand compared to all of the other UK ice cream brands. The bigger the share, the better that ice cream company is faring.

Conversions

Your conversion rate effectively tracks the number of users who navigate to your website and then convert - which could mean buying a product, booking a table, or calling your company. Conversion rates are an important measure of success for all online marketing campaigns, because ultimately views and clicks mean nothing if they don't lead to conversions.

Response rate and time

Social media advertising metrics don't just measure the success of your social media posts. They can also be used to track your own record for customer service. Use these metrics to see how fast your support team is responding to messages and whether all messages are being responded to, and tweak your staff schedules until you hit the sweet spot.