Social media analytics are a powerful tool for helping you understand what’s working and what isn’t with your social media accounts, thus enhancing your social media awareness. They allow you to track metrics such as engagement, reach, and audience demographics, as well as compare performance across different platforms, all of which contribute to a better understanding of your Social Media Awareness.
Here are the most important social media metrics to track in 2023:
1. Reach
Reach is simply the number of people who see your content. Monitoring your average reach, along with the reach of each specific post, story, or video, is crucial. Additionally, examining what percentage of your reach consists of followers versus non-followers is informative. If many non-followers are seeing your content, it indicates that it’s either being widely shared or is performing well in algorithms, or both.
2. Impressions
Impressing indicates how many times people have viewed your content. It can exceed your reach because the same person might view your content multiple times. Importantly, if you notice an exceptionally high level of impressions relative to reach, it suggests that people are viewing a post multiple times, prompting further investigation into its appeal.
3. Audience growth rate
This metric measures the rate at which your brand gains new followers on social media over a specified period. Specifically, the growth rate, reflecting new followers as a percentage of your total audience, highlights that early on, a few new followers can greatly boost your rate. However, as your audience grows, maintaining this rate demands a larger follower increase.
4. Engagement Rate
The engagement rate calculates the total number of engagements (like reactions, comments, and shares) your content receives relative to your audience. Defining “audience” can vary—whether relative to the number of followers or including engagements from non-followers too. As such, there are multiple ways to calculate engagement, each providing different insights into how your content resonates with users.
5. Video views
If you’re creating videos, understanding viewer engagement starts with knowing how many people watch them. Different social networks define a “view” in varying ways, often counting just a few seconds of watch time. Therefore, video views offer a preliminary indicator of how many people are at least starting your videos, but deeper metrics are needed to fully gauge engagement levels.
6. Click-through rate (CTR)
The CTR measures how often people click on a link in your post to access additional content, which could range from a blog post to your online store. CTR is an excellent gauge of how well your content prompts further interest, indicating its effectiveness in engaging users.
7. Conversion rate
This metric is crucial as it measures how often your social content leads to a conversion event, such as a subscription, download, or sale. A high conversion rate indicates that your social media efforts effectively feed into your sales funnel, highlighting the direct value of your content.
8. Cost-per-click (CPC)
CPC represents the amount you pay for each click on a social ad. It’s essential to consider this in the context of the lifetime value of a customer or the average order value. A higher conversion rate coupled with a high customer lifetime value can justify a higher spend per click.
9. Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
CPM calculates the cost for every thousand impressions of your social media ad. This metric is useful for assessing ad reach and visibility, focusing on the breadth of ad views rather than direct user actions.
