Essential Social Media Metrics You Should Be Analysing

Digging into metrics such as reach, impressions, likes, comments, shares and page views is a crucial part of refining your social media strategy.

By tracking metrics such as these, you’ll be able to better understand the effectiveness of your strategy, see where you’re falling short and start setting new goals for the future.

But where to start? Here are the three most important metrics to have a handle on when analysing your social media content:

Engagement

This is an obvious one. In fact, it’s so obvious that some people tend to conflate all social media metrics with engagement (hint: this isn’t the case).

Engagement is specifically concerned with actions that your readers take having seen your content, such as likes, shares, comments, reacts, retweets, etc.

Engagement metrics are the most representative of how much of an impact your content has had on your followers. They indicate whether or not your content is resonating with people.

Low engagement metrics mean going back to the drawing board for some fresh topics of conversation or ways of presenting your content.

High engagement rates mean that you’ve struck upon gold.

Make notes on what you believe people have connected with in your content with high engagement rates.

Not only will this help you to keep producing content in the same vein, it will also give you a greater understanding of your followers.

When analysing your engagement per piece of content, you need to work out your average rate by adding up all of the interactions your followers have had with that content (likes, comments, shares etc.) and divide this number by your total number of followers.

Multiply this by 100 to get your average engagement rate percentage.

Don’t be discouraged if this number seems quite low.

Facebook and Twitter have notoriously low engagement rates, roughly around 0.5 to 1%. Instagram has the highest rates of engagement out of all social media platforms and yet that’s still only between 3-6%.

Anything higher than this and you’re doing amazingly!

Reach / Impressions

We’ve touched on reach and impressions before, but if you missed out on any of our pearls of wisdom don’t worry, we’ll fill you in.

These two metrics are both helpful to keep track of when analysing the results of social media campaigns and setting goals for the future.

But they can be a bit difficult to understand in relation to one another when you’re first getting to grips with your social media strategy.

Reach is the number of unique accounts that have been exposed to a piece of content you’ve posted on social media.

Impressions are the number of times that post was delivered to users’ feeds - regardless of whether those users engaged with it or whether they’d seen it before.

This might seem a bit confusing to begin with. Those two definitions sounds pretty similar at a first glance.

Well, the important distinction to keep in mind is that reach is about how many unique accounts have had your content appear in their newsfeed, whereas impressions are not unique to one user.

Some posts can be shown to users multiple times and therefore would count as more than one impression.

For example, if you see a post by a page that you follow on Facebook and then see it again in your newsfeed because it’s been re-shared by a friend of yours, that would count as two impressions but would only have a reach of one.

To increase your reach and/or impressions, try to find out when your followers are most likely to be online in order for the maximum amount of people to be able to potentially see your content.

There’s a lot of debate about the best times to post on social media but ultimately, nothing is going to be as helpful as your own analytics for determining when your followers are online.

On Facebook you can find this information in Page > Insights > Posts > When your fans are online.

On Instagram you can find this in Insights > Audience > Followers. You can view the times that your followers are online either by Hours or Days by switching between these two tabs.

Twitter and LinkedIn unfortunately don’t have this information in their Analytics.