Social Media
Social media’s importance in a company’s web marketing strategy is no secret. For this strategy to succeed, you need to publish relevant and quality content, but you also need to constantly interact with your community. That said, these good practices alone won’t guarantee your long-term success. There is always room for improvement, provided that we know what works and what doesn’t. This is why, in both cases, it is important to analyze your results so you can change or adjust your methods. For this purpose, we recommend using metrics.
In this article, we will present the various metrics that can be used to measure performance on social media and indicate which are the most useful.
Implement an effective strategy
Before you start analyzing your results, you need to define clear goals for yourself.
These goals will make it easier for you to consider the metrics you will need, what you want to measure and which tools are right for the job.
In concrete terms, here are some questions you can ask yourself: are you looking to develop your brand awareness? To strengthen your credibility? To interact with your customers? To generate leads? To generate sales?
To make things clearer, let’s take an example: let’s say you own a restaurant and you’ve decided to use your social media to better promote your craftsmanship and products in an effort to expand your customer base. Your analysis should focus on your visibility and the quality of your publications to find out which content generates the most interaction (commitment, mentions, shares, etc.).
Statistics make sense if you know what purpose they serve, why we use them and how we use them.
Understand the function of each metric
Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are performance indicators for decision-making support. Each of these indicators should be tracked based on the goals you have set for yourself. We will group them into four sub-categories.
Brand awareness
– Reach (organic or paid): Reach tells you how far your content goes in terms of audience. In other words, it indicates the number of people who have seen your publication only once. Be careful, however, the reach is an estimate. It allows you to determines the size of your potential audience.
For example, a reach of 10,000 means that 10,000 people have seen your publication once in their news feed.
Using Facebook Insight to analyze the reach of your publications.
– Impressions: impressions should be clearly distinguished from reach. They correspond to the number of times your publication appeared on a screen. This content can be viewed several times by the same person.
For example, if your reach is 1000 as in the previous example and the number of impressions is 10,000, you can assume that the users have seen the post 10 times.
– Mentions: mentions indicate the number of times your content has been mentioned by a person or influencer. In particular, they make it possible to reach more people. Being mentioned often can mean that your content is valued for its quality.
For example, when a person or influencer mentions you in a post or shares some of your content, they use the @username function.
You then receive a notification that they have mentioned you
– Community: This indicator shows your number of subscribers. You can follow its progress. You should closely observe any increase or decrease in subscriber count since it is directly correlated to your content quality.
This indicator also tells you more about your community’s profile (gender, age, location).
To measure the reach of your posts, impressions, mentions and community, you can use social media tools such as Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights and Twitter Analytics. Each platform has its own special features.
For example, with LinkedIn Demographics, you can learn more about the professional characteristics of your site visitors. Facebook Insights will let you know the hours of activity in your community, etc.
There are alternatives to built-in tools to track the results of your actions on social networks. These include tools such as Hootsuite or CX Social, to name a few.
Content quality
– Frequency of publication: As the name suggests, this indicator shows you how often you publish your content. This is a good way to see where you stand and adjust your strategy if necessary.
– Interactions: These are linked to users’ interactions with your content. This includes all likes, comments, retweets, shares, reposts, etc. Note that the most interesting ones in terms of reach are shares, retweets and comments.
– Engagement rate: The engagement rate measures the willingness of Internet users to interact with your brand. This rate is the ratio between the number of interactions obtained on a publication and the number of people in your community. A high rate indicates that your content is relevant.
Using Facebook, the most widely used social network, as an example, to calculate the engagement rate of your community, you should use the following formula:
For a post with 2000 comments, 5000 likes and 1500 shares and a page with 25,000 subscribers, we have a rate of 34%:
If you don’t want to do the calculation yourself, you can see this rate directly in the “Statistics” tab of your Facebook page, then “Publications”.
More generally, as with reputation indicators, analysis of content quality indicators such as the frequency of your publications, interactions and engagement rates, you can use the tools integrated into social media.
Website traffic
Social networks are a great way to generate traffic to your website or blog. Two metrics are essential to analyze this traffic:
– Click Rate (CRT): The click rate is the number of clicks recorded on a clickable element relative to the number of times that the element is displayed.
For example, if a banner ad is displayed 1000 times and clicked 100 times, the click rate is 10%.
– Bounce rate: The bounce rate is used to see if people spend time on your site or if they leave soon after arriving. A high bounce rate can indicate that your content is irrelevant, unappealing, etc.
The bounce rate is calculated as follows:
Number of visitors who bounced back/Total number of visitors
For example, if out of 8000 users who visited your site, 3500 bounced, your bounce rate will be 44%. This means that almost one in two users has left your site without taking any action. Generally, a bounce rate exceeding 50% is a bad sign.
Be careful, however, how you interpret the bounce rate. Some pages naturally have a high bounce rate, as is often the case with blog articles. Imagine, for example, that one of your Facebook subscribers views your articles as soon as you share them on Facebook. In this case the user arrives on your article, reads it and leaves your site without having visited any other page (normal, since his goal was simply to read the article you shared). In this case, your bounce rate will be 100%.
The bounce rate should therefore be combined with several other factors such as the time spent on the page. If you have a site with a main goal of having the user read your content, you could also create targets to find out if the user has viewed 50% of the article, for example.
The analysis of traffic indicators will mainly be done using Google Analytics. Effective analysis will drastically improve traffic to your website!
Lead-to-customer conversion
– Conversion rate: this measures the ratio between the individuals who carried out the desired action as part of the marketing campaign and the total number of individuals reached by the campaign (purchase of a product or service presented in one of your publications).
For example, you sent an email to 2000 people to promote a free downloadable white paper for contact information. If 162 people filled in their information to download the book, then the conversion rate will be:
Conclusion
A successful social media strategy is one that involves a comprehensive analytical process. This may seem quite long, but it is by no means a waste of time. On the contrary, it gives you a significant advantage over your competitors. However, you need to understand the usefulness of each metric that allows you to conduct your analysis. Among all the metrics that have been presented in this article, those you should pay particular attention to are the engagement rate, the growth in your number of subscribers, mentions, the frequency of your publications and the click rate. These are all indicators of the quality and relevance of your content, which makes them essential. Also, don’t forget to check out the number of interactions you have with your community.
Don’t hesitate to ask a social media specialist for advice. You can also contact us if you would like to benefit from our community management expertise.
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