Five Metrics You Need to Measure On Social Media

Getting your social media marketing strategy right is all about preparation, planning and then monitoring your strategy’s success. The best way to monitor the success of your social media marketing is by measuring a number of metrics, working out what's benefiting your company and what isn't, and then adapting and improving your strategy.

Facebook, Google, YouTube and Pinterest all have analytics tools which can help you measure key metrics. If you want to measure your success on Twitter, use a social media management tool like Ezeesocial. What metrics do you need to measure, then, to measure your success? There are quite a few, but to start with, here are the five key metrics you should be monitoring.

1. Reach

Essentially, reach is how many people have seen your content. Generally, only your fans and followers will see your content but, occasionally, it will be seen by the friends of your fans or general users. If you pay for advertising or share your content with the public, then general users are more likely to see your content.

Measuring your reach is vitally important, not only does your reach illustrate how popular your content is, it also gives you an idea of the value of your content's audience. If you have a lot of followers and fans but your reach is still poor, then your fans and followers are purposefully ignoring your posts or, even worse, hiding your content from their feeds.

By measuring your reach, you can work out how to improve your content so that it gets seen by the right audience.

2. Engagement

Facebook defines engagement as “the number of people who have clicked anywhere on your post”.Comments, likes, retweets, favorites, repins, shares and +1s are all types of engagement. Engagement, at its simplest, shows you what sort of content is most appreciated by your audience.

You need to monitor the engagement on your social media sites so that you can work out what sort of content works best and then use it to interact with your audience. If someone comments on your Facebook post, or retweets your tweet, it gives you the opportunity to start a conversation with them online and, maybe, find out a little about their perception of your company.

3. Talking About

It is vital for any company, however big or small, to be part of the conversation online. If no one is talking about your brand, then no one will hear about it. Word-of-mouth marketing is still one of the most powerful marketing tools in a company’s arsenal.

Businesses need to listen to the conversation. They need to try to get involved themselves so that they can promote their brand. Businesses also need to monitor the conversation about their industry, as well as the conversation in general: there are countless opportunities online for companies to join conversations and draw attention to themselves.

4. Sentiment


Leading on from the section above, sentiment analysis is the measurement of how popular your brand is online. By monitoring what people say about your company you can alter and adapt your strategy in order to change public opinion.

Social media management tools, such as Ezeesocial, provide users with graphs and tables measuring sentiment online. Businesses can also see all the comments about their company online and even answer directly to them.

5. Click-Through Rate

There’s little point in maintaining an active social media presence unless it drives traffic to your website, encouraging users to buy your products and services. It is vitally important that you measure the click-through rate (or CTR) of your links: are people clicking on the links you post on social media?

Work out what links get clicked most often. Are they shortened URLs? Are they the links you post on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest? Pinterest pictures can link back to your site, are people clicking on them? For more information on getting your Twitter links just right, check out this article I wrote last week.

How do you monitor and measure the success of your social media strategies?