Social Media Analytics

Engagement

All the metrics that signal how the audience interacts with our content fall under the engagement metrics. Likes, comments, and shares are all engagement metrics. Other than these individual engagement metrics, analytics tools can also tell us the average engagement rate of a post.

Audience growth

Audience growth is a measure of how quickly our audience is growing on social media. This metric is especially important for new businesses to analyze how fast their popularity is growing. We can find the growth rate percentage over a specific period by dividing the number of new followers gained during that period by the total number of followers and multiplying by 100.

Conversion

Driving conversions is the ultimate goal of every marketing strategy. Our social media efforts might help develop brand awareness and build engagement with the audience but are they bringing any conversions? Are the viewers of our post actually clicking to go to our website and perform the desired action? And what rate? Multiple metrics help us track the traffic from social platforms to our website that leads to a conversion. These include click-through-rate and conversion rate.

1. Click-through-rate: The rate at which our audience clicks on the link in our post. It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks on the post by the total impressions on the post and multiplying the result by 100 to get the percentage.

2. Conversion rate: It refers to the conversions driven by a post on a page compared to the total visitors to the page. The metric is calculated by dividing the total number of conversions driven by clicking the link in the post by the total visitors to that link. Multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage.

Customer response rate

When customers or potential customers message us on our social profile, comment on our post or leave a review, they expect a response—and fast. Are we responding to our audience’s engagements fast enough to keep them satisfied? To track this, we’ll need to look at our customer response rate.

Suppose we’re measuring this metric over a week, and 40 people engaged with our brand during the time frame. If we respond to 30 people, our customer response rate will be 75%.

Match the categories on the left with their corresponding metrics on the right.

Social media analytics tools

Once we know which metrics to go after, we need to choose a tool which can help us measure and analyze them. Tracking and analyzing our performance on social media is called social listening.

Most social media platforms offer their own analytics tool to track performance of our profile and posts. In some cases, we may be able to gain more advanced insights using third-party software. Some of the best ones include:

Hootsuite

Hootsuite lets us schedule our social media posts in advance. It involves several other features as well, including social listening. It offers a free plan, but for deeper insights, we’ll need to look at one of their paid options, starting at $49 per month, as observed at the time of writing this lesson.

It lets us monitor our metrics across all platforms in one place so we can compare our results and see where we need to work more. For posts, it tracks individual engagement metrics, engagement rate, reach, impressions, views, and more. Additionally, for our profile, we can track audience growth, profile visits, overall engagement rate, and other key metrics that will tell us how well we’re performing on each platform.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social lets us maintain activity calenders, schedule posts, and monitor analytics across five major social media platforms for the standard plan. We can access the 30-day free trial complete with advanced features. The app lets us track impressions, clicks, follower growth, engagement, post performance and all other key metrics for all our social profiles from the same location.

Keyhole

Keyhole is another useful social media analytics tool. Though it tracks several other metrics, its distinguishing features are hashtag and keyword analysis. We can create trackers on niche-specific hashtags or keywords so that whenever people start talking about it, we can join the conversation before our competitors. We can also learn which tags are most popular, when are our followers most active and which are the most important influencers in our niche. They offer customized pricing depending on the requirements of our business, accompanied by a free trial to get us started.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that gives us basics insights on the impact of our social media marketing efforts. We can use it to track social media conversions and ROIs on our social media campaigns. We can also identify the social media platforms that bring us the most traffic and the type of content that performs best on each platform. To view the social media report, log into the Google Analytics account, go to the “Acquisitions” tab and click “Social”. The report will give us all the details about the performance of our social media accounts.

Test your knowledge

Choose the correct answer for each of the following questions.