Measuring and optimizing your social media strategy is essential if you want to compete in today’s market. We know it can seem intimidating with so many different measurable metrics. From follower count to engagement rate, it seems there is so much to keep track of. So what are the most important organic social media metrics to measure?
In this blog, we’ll break down exactly what it is you should be measuring and reassure you it will be easier than you think! So, let’s dive into what social media metrics are, why they’re important, and which ones you should be paying attention to.
When launching social media for your brand, your team needs to set clear intentions and goals for growth so you know exactly what to work towards. Your organic social media goals will determine your metrics to track. Once your goals are set, putting social media metrics in place is essential for measuring how well your social strategy is performing and ultimately if your social media efforts are having an impact on the success of your brand. If you have more than one goal for your brand, you’ll always want to consider a combination of metrics and never use one metric as a measurement of success. So, what should you be tracking?
- Engagement – Anytime someone “engages with,” interacts, or takes action with your content. Engagements are different depending on what each social platform measures as an engagement, but some common examples of engagements are likes/reactions, comments, or shares. This will help to give you a closer look into how involved your followers are.
- Engagement Rate – The amount of interaction your content receives relative to the number of people who saw your content. The engagement rate is a great way to determine if your content resonates with your audience. In order to measure this, you divide the sum of engagements on your post by the number of impressions, or people who saw your post.
- Reach – tracks the number of unique accounts that have viewed your content. To gain valuable insight from your reach metric, look at what percentage is made up of followers vs. non-followers.
- Impressions – Often confused with Reach, impressions track how often a specific post appears on someone’s social media feed. One user can track multiple impressions if they view the post more than once. If you have a high number of impressions compared to reach, users may be reengaging with your content.
- Views – Most often used with YouTube, but relevant to any videos posted across your social channels. Similar to impressions, this measures the number of people who have watched at least the first few seconds of your video. This is a good, quick indicator of how many people have seen at least the start of your video.
Although there are dozens of social media metrics out there, the above list breaks down the most important few that we believe your brand should focus on when getting started. These combined metrics will give you a full picture of your organic social media performance and insight into whether or not your strategy is resonating as strongly with your audience as you planned.
If you are looking for help assessing these metrics or diving deeper into understanding them, or if you are unsure where to start with launching social media for your brand, that’s what our team is here for. The BuzzShift team is only an email away, and we’re always happy to help grow your social media standing!
About BuzzShift
BuzzShift is a digital growth strategy agency with a focus on mid-market, scaling, purpose-driven DTC Brands. By combining the ideologies of branding, performance marketing, and retention agency, we are able to create memorable experiences with measurable resaults, and build long-term success for our clients with scalable, sustainable growth. Learn more about BuzzShift.
