An expert marketer helps small businesses key in on which social media marketing metrics to focus their efforts on.
Small businesses that aren’t measuring and monitoring their social media performance are missing out.
One barrier could be that businesses don't have a clear strategy or understanding of where to begin with measuring and tracking performance. You can’t improve without an understanding of where you’re starting from.
Keep reading for a quick overview of the importance of tracking these numbers. Then, we’ll cover six social media analytics every small business should be tracking in order to transform your social media presence into a revenue driving engine.
Why are social media metrics important for your small business?
Operating a social media account without tracking analytics is a lot like playing baseball while ignoring all the stats—you might win, you might lose, but you'll never know exactly what it is that you could be doing to help you win more often.
Keeping an eye on your social media performance allows you to track your marketing team's efficiency and determine whether certain tactics are working for you or if it's time for a change in approach. Then, as you’re making those changes, you can measure and prove ROI and marketing impact. You’ll have a better understanding of your audience and what they like to see, share, or engage with, rather than just guessing. All of this will help you make strategic business decisions on how to improve future marketing efforts and use your resources effectively.
6 key social media metrics to monitor
Diving into analytics can be an overwhelming practice because there is simply so much data at our fingertips these days. But if you can cut through the noise and focus on these six metrics, you’re going to have a far better understanding of what’s working and what’s not when it comes to your social media.
1. Measure your reach with audience analytics
Reach refers to the total number of unique accounts that saw your post. One way to determine whether or not a post has “good” reach would be to compare it to your overall followers on your account(s). Every industry is going to have different benchmarks so you may need to keep track of reach over time to get an idea of how many people saw your post.
While you’re trying to establish these benchmarks, take a look at your competitors' reach as well. Having a robust set of competitor analytics included in your social media metrics can help you see how you’re measuring up against your competitors, both direct and indirect.
Keep in mind: Your total reach also includes people who aren’t followers. For instance, social media networks will automatically serve up your content to followers of followers if they engage or to people that the algorithm deems might be interested in your content.
Over time, as your total followers increases, your reach should as well.
2. Identify impressions per post
While reach might measure individual people that saw your post, impressions represent how many times your post was displayed.
If your impressions are higher than reach, it means that your post was served up multiple times to the same account. In this case, it might be worth digging into the post and seeing why people came back to it multiple times.
On the other hand, if your impressions per post for a particular campaign or type of post are lower, it can inform decisions about future campaigns and strategies.
3. Calculate engagements per post
Engagement is a direct indicator of an audience’s interest in your post. This metric is a measure of how often users interact with your content by reacting, sharing, and commenting. Engagement metrics can help identify marketing opportunities, like which types of content resonate the most with users, or where people spend most of their time on the platform.
Average engagement percentage is going to vary wildly by platform or industry, but in most cases it’s going to be around 5% or below of total impressions. Similar to reach and impressions, you’re going to want to keep an eye on any outliers where engagement is significantly higher or lower than usual.
Depending on the types of engagement and response you’re getting, having a breakdown of customer service and community management analytics can be important as well. What this means is understanding exactly what types of engagement your posts are getting. Are you getting responses that are about their specific account management problems or are they related to the post in question?
4. Monitor traffic per month with performance analytics
The goal of social media isn’t solely to get likes and engagements. You want to get people to move from those networks onto your own website and have them browsing your products or services. By using a web analytics platform, you can keep track of exactly how much of your monthly website traffic is coming directly from social media platforms.
Make sure you’re tagging all traffic coming into your website with UTM parameters (Urchin tracking module). These are bits of code that look like this:
“?utm_campaign=summersale&source=Facebook.”
By building these parameters into every link you publish, you can get a much clearer picture within your web analytics platform of where that traffic comes from and where it eventually ends up.
5. Follow the breadcrumbs to track revenue
Social media is a means to an end and, for most businesses, it hopefully will end up with increased revenue. Going from social media to transactions can be a difficult trail of breadcrumbs to follow, but that doesn’t mean you’re at a loss.
Aside from UTMs, one of the easiest, most foolproof ways to understand whether purchases came from social media or not is one that often gets overlooked: asking. On the order form, during sales conversations, or wherever else it makes sense, be sure to include a question that asks, “How did you hear about us?”
6. Go a step further with competitive analytics
One further way to gather insights on your social media performance is through investigating competitors' analytics.
While there are many areas to compare and assess, a simple way to get started is by assessing the competitions’ top keywords and content performance on social media.
Competitive intelligence software can even help organizations track, collect, store, and analyze information about their competitors—all in one place.
Stay dialed in to social
Detailed social media analytics aren’t just for enterprises anymore—they can be a powerful tool for small-business owners.
Not only can it show you how well your campaigns are performing and what can be improved on, but it also allows you to refine your strategies in order to maximize revenue.
You don’t have to master everything at once. Start small and before long, you’ll know your analytics inside and out, helping you make decisions that will steer your business and marketing ships in the right direction.
Are you interested in outsourcing your social media marketing needs, including tracking performance? Check out "Should You Outsource Social Media Marketing for Your Small Business."
You can also browse Capterra's guide to the top social media services agencies.