Metrics and Analytics are Important
Being a great Michigan Tech social media admin (SMA) involves balancing creativity and being strategic. If the role were an ice cream sundae, then getting to flex your creative muscles is the cherry on top—and analytics are the cream and sugar mixed together to make your ice cream taste delicious.
Social media metrics are data points that communicate how your content strategy is performing. They also help you learn how you can improve. Think of your social media analytics as a record for your account's online posts and interactions that indicates how many people saw, liked, shared, saved, or commented on your content.
Without metrics, an informed strategy is much harder to create. Tying your content creation efforts to social media goals is how you can prove success. The data will also help you recognize content that isn’t doing well, which, in turn, helps inform your strategy moving forward even more.
What to Track
There is no single social media metric that communicates how a strategy is performing. In order to have a holistic view of content performance, it’s important to rely on a blend of measurements. Just as social media is constantly in flux with platform changes, social media metrics are, too. It’s important to reassess on a regular basis, especially if what you’re tracking is crucial to informing your overall strategy. It’s also important to mention that some platforms call the same metric different names (for example, Twitter and YouTube only offer impressions, not reach). Below, we will walk you through some of the key metrics we recommend focusing on.
Follower Count and Growth
Follower count is often labeled as a vanity metric but it is something you should pay attention to. Follower growth tells a more encompassing story about your page’s health and users’ awareness of your content. Follower growth rate measures how fast your account is growing by dividing your net new followers for a specific time period by how many followers you had at the beginning of that time period.
- Net New Followers: Ending Follower Count minus Starting Follower Count
- Follower Growth Rate Percentage: Net New Followers divided by Starting Follower Count, multiplied by 100 percent
For example, let’s say the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts had 10,000 followers at the beginning of June. By the end of June, they had 10,200 followers. The Rozsa would calculate their growth rate percentage like this: 200 divided by 10,000, then multiplied by 100 percent, which equals 2 percent.
Awareness Metrics
As the name suggests, awareness metrics are important for measuring brand awareness connected to social media strategy. Here are a few metrics to prioritize.
Impressions
At the social media post level, impressions are how many times a post is displayed to a person. This data point can be an indicator of how popular a piece of content is and that some people may be viewing it multiple times.
Reach
Reach is the potential of unique viewers a post has. Another way of thinking about reach is how many individuals have seen a post. The difference between reach and impressions can be a bit confusing at first. Think of it like this: If someone sees a post eight times, that’s eight impressions. But that person would only count as one person reached. They are both necessary to track, particularly if a social media strategy is focused around brand awareness.
Return on Investment and Impact Metrics
Conversion Rates
Social media conversion rate is the percentage of an audience on social media that completes a desired action that aligns with a goal. It's a combination of interactions and actions, such as clicking on an ad or watching a video, that ideally lead to a website page visit or sign-up.
- Social Media Conversion Rate: Number of Conversions divided by Total Audience, multiplied by 100 percent
For example, if 50 people sign up for an e-newsletter out of 1,000 people who interacted with your post, the conversion rate is 50 divided by 1,000, then multiplied by 100 percent, which equals 5 percent.
If your conversion rate is low, consider reviewing your messaging, content, and calls to action using A/B testing—a way of comparing performance by creating and posting two versions of content. The A version (a control) usually sticks closer to your original strategy and the B version (a variant) tests out a new way of doing things. Your audience's response can help you decide on content strategy updates.
Social Media Referral Traffic
Referrals are how a user lands on a webpage. In web analytics, you can find this data broken down into sources. Social media referral traffic describes the people who visit your site directly from a social media platform or post.
The best way to measure social media referral traffic is to utilize UTM tracking. UTM is short for Urchin Traffic Monitor. UTM tracking involves adding a code to any URLs you share on social media. This enables you to see exactly how much traffic is coming to your webpage specifically from social media channels, posts, and ads in Google Analytics. UTM tracking is a great way to measure how effectively your social media content is driving people to your website.
Engagement Metrics
Social media engagement indicates how much your audience interacts with your content. High engagement rates indicate a healthy and interested audience. Quality engagement communicates that your audience is connecting with the content you are creating enough to go out of their way and engage with it through likes, comments, reactions, saves, and shares.
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is a social media metric that measures how much of your audience is actively engaging with your content. Essentially, it measures the amount of interaction a piece of content gets compared to reach or audience size. This metric helps with proving that your social media strategy is creating meaningful interactions.
Each social media channel has different metrics to pull from in order to calculate engagement rate. Hootsuite’s engagement rate calculator is also a great resource found in the button below.
Here are some platform-specific metrics to consider utilizing when calculating engagement rate.
| Platform | Engagement Rate Metrics |
|---|---|
| Likes, comments, shares, saves, DMs, profile visits, Story sticker taps, use of branded hashtags | |
| Reactions, clicks, comments, shares, private messages | |
| X (Twitter) | Retweets, mentions, comments, use of branded hashtags |
| Likes, comments, pins | |
| Likes, comments, reposts, shares via private message, custom button clicks | |
| YouTube | Likes, comments, shares, downloads, saves |
Likes, Comments, Shares, Reposts, Reactions, Saves, and More
Actions that an audience can take directly on a social media post are engagements on a smaller level. These individual engagements—likes, comments, shares, reposts, reactions, saves—on their own are considered vanity metrics. But when you add them up, they communicate which of your posts are most successful based on what your audience likes.