Establishing Your Most Important Metrics

7 Steps to Improving Your Social Media Marketing Plan in 2018 (Step 3/7)

Even though your targeted social media metrics are the most important step of the strategy, its often the spot where most people veer off the path. “Vanity Metrics” like follower count and likes are always good to measure, but do they tell you the whole story of your brand on social media?

We often obsess over followers and likes as if they are the truth to a campaign, but it’s essential to take a step back and evaluate the other social metrics associated with your overall goals. 

Tracking engagement often paints a better picture, because building lasting relationships is the key to winning any social media campaign. Large audiences and likable content are great, but here are some other metrics you’re gonna want to pursue in 2018: 

• Reach: Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How far is your content spreading across social? How many people are seeing your content? Maybe they aren’t interacting with it, but it is important that it is reaching their feeds. On average, you’re going to want to reach out and touch people between 5 and 7 times before they have any desire to understand what your company does. 
• Clicks: This is the amount of clicks on your content, company name or logo. Link clicks are critical toward understanding how users move through your marketing funnel and interact with your content. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what is working and what is not. Being able to look at these measurements will help you decide where to direct the most effort and money in future campaigns. 
• Engagement: The total number of social interactions on your posts. For engagement, it’s about seeing who interacted and why they chose to interact with that content. You may want to divide your engagement by total reach to get your engagement ratio. Comparing this ration across marketing campaigns is often easier than comparing raw engagement numbers alone. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
• Hashtag performance: What were your most used hashtags on your own side? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Or what hashtags created the most engagement? Hashtags are a HUGE tool at your disposal, but you need to approach using them with #intentionality. 
• Sentiment: This is the measurement of how users reacted to your content, brand or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment are people associating with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find what people are saying.
• Organic and paid likes: More than just standard Likes, these likes are defined from paid or organic content. For channels like Facebook, organic engagement is much harder to gain traction, which is why many brands turn to Facebook Ads. However, earning organic likes on Instagram isn’t quite as difficult.