Maisie Lloyd
I'm passionate about recording the world, but most of all driven by creativity and collaborative environments. My experience revolves around the production of digital content, pertaining to graphic design, writing copy, and video and audio content.
What is a social media metric?
A social media metric is the measurable interactions and analytics collected as an audience engages with your content or page. Metrics allow us to track, analyse, and strategise ways to improve social media performance.
Social media metrics can be collated and asses through a content audit, these allow for a business to marry its goals to actionable changes within a content strategy.
Why are metrics critical to strategy?
Measuring performance – Metrics make it easier to assess what is and isn’t working, however, they’re only valuable if they are consistently monitored and tracked. This ensures that there is a comparison point from the initial set of data which the new data will then build on from.
Whilst measuring against historic performance is critical to strategy, it’s also important to understand any competitor’s achievements.
Resources – metrics can help you identify how efficient your content strategy is, especially with the allocated resources used within the strategy. For instance, low-achieving content that has taken a significant amount of time to do can be indicative that resources (in this case time) were not worth the outcome. This can help inform resource allocation as a new strategy is devised.
Style of content – Metrics can very easily indicate what your audience is and isn’t receptive to. This is all about knowing how to create content that is suited to the audience’s consumption behaviour.
Setting realistic goals – Understanding what is achievable allows you to set tangible goals, making growth more probable and realistic to work towards.
What social media metrics should I focus on?
Each platform has different metrics which are all critical to understand and record, for various reasons. It’s important to understand what it is a metric’s purpose is, whether that’s for recording the number of accounts viewing a post, or clicking a link. Each tells a different story about the audience’s journey to your content, product or service.
Followers
The follower count on a profile is indicative of how many unique users are following their page. This is a particularly useful metric to record as it can tell you a lot about the growth or decline of the audience.
A metric which can be useful to monitor audience growth is the audience growth rate, this can be calculated by: subtracting the initial audience number from the current audience number and then dividing the sum of that equation by the initial audience count. Then the final step of the calculation is to times the sum by 100 to discover the audience growth rate percentage.
Impressions
Impressions account for the number of times your content is displayed on a feed, what’s particularly interesting is this can count instances where the same user has been displayed the same content multiple times. It’s important to factor in when assessing your metrics, as it isn’t always indicative of the unique users viewing content.
Reach
Reach unlike impressions, solely focuses on the unique users viewing content, so whilst a post may have 50 impressions, it may have reached 27 phones, of which some saw the content multiple times.
Reach is a realistic value that helps you understand how much of your audience is seeing the content.
Engagement/ reactions
Engagement is quite a broad term, however we specifically mean when someone actively reacts to a post, whether that’s giving a YouTube video a thumbs down, or reacting with the care emoji on Facebook.
This particular metric is useful as it can let you know how responsive your audience is to content. In the case of Facebook with the reactions, it also provides greater insight into the sentiment around the content. Similarly to YouTube with the thumbs up or thumbs down, it allows a creator to find a clear distinction between what is and isn’t working for their audience.
Comments
Comments are another form of engagement which can provide more qualitative data about audience sentiment. It’s particularly useful to understand how much of your audience wants to have an active conversation around your content. This means you can then diversify the content, to engage and gain more information out of the audience. To better understand their behaviours whether that’s around content consumption or spending habits.
Shares/ reposts
Shares and reposts are particularly interesting metrics to factor in, as they can directly impact the reach content might receive. It also indicates the audience is actively engaging with content on a deeper level than a reaction.
Click-through rate
A click-through rate lets you know how many users are actively engaging with the content by either clicking on a post to expand it, like on LinkedIn with carousels or by clicking on a link which redirects traffic to an external web page.
Saves
Saves are another key form of engagement which demonstrates a curiosity from the audience. More so, it indicates an investment into the content, likely that they will keep digesting it at future dates.
