If you’re someone like me, who doesn’t like numbers (and who may or may not have flunked in math), measuring social media metrics on a regular basis might sound like a daunting task.

But guess what? Measuring social media metrics is not as daunting as calculus or algebra. Once you have your business goals laid out, it’s just a matter of identifying the right metrics to prove that your social media efforts are paying off.

Tracking the right metrics will help establish the connection between your social media activities and your goals. This, in turn, will allow you to clearly demonstrate how social media is contributing to your company’s business objectives.

In this article, we’ll go over the 5 essential metrics that you should track to make sure your social media marketing strategies are effective. Read on to find what they are.

1. Average Engagement Rate

It’s important that you know how many people are reacting to the content you post on social media and to do that, you need to track the engagement metrics. By tracking the engagement metrics, you will identify which content type drives more engagement and which doesn’t.

To say something meaningful about how many people like, share, or comment on your posts on average, you need to track your Average Engagement Rate. Use this as a benchmark for your next few social posts to determine whether you’ve hit home with your target audience, or if you need to tweak your content for next time.

How to track it:

  • Decide on a reporting period
  • Add up the total number of engagements across all posts
  • (Total engagements/number of posts) x 100 = average engagement rate

2. Social share of voice

How many people are talking about your brand compared to your competitors?

Share of voice metrics gives you a definitive look into how much your brand dominates on a social network compared to your competitors. With the share of voice metrics, you will be able to tell how your brand stacks up against your industry competitors and what you can learn from your competitors’ successes on social.

How to track it:

  • Use an analytics tool to measure the number of mentions you’ve received
  • Use the same tool to track the number of mentions your competitors have received
  • (Your mentions / total mentions) x 100 = share of voice

3. Conversion Rate

Do you measure social media success based solely on how many people clicked “like” on your latest post?

Not really, right?

Sure, it’s nice to know that your social media posts are getting a ton of engagement, but that’s not quite enough if your audience didn’t take action the way you wanted them to. To gauge the success of your social media campaigns, you need to measure the conversion rate, which tells you what percentage of your users convert into leads/sales.

How to track it:

  • Determine the total amount of traffic you’re driving from social
  • Determine how many conversions resulted from the traffic
  • (Number of conversions/total traffic) x 100 = conversion rate

4. Response Time

Customers are less patient these days, and they’re expecting a speedy response on social media. So, how do you know if your brand hit reply at lightning speed or if it took its own sweet time?

To clear that doubt, you need to measure your brand’s response time on social media.

Response time metrics help you measure the average time it takes your brand to respond to a post or a tweet on social media. By measuring your response time, not only do you help improve your social media response time (and get a fancy badge), you also make your customers happier.

How to track it:

  • In Facebook, consistent responsiveness will be displayed as a badge on your page
  • To earn the badge, you must have a response rate of 90% and a response time of 15 min
  • Consider incorporating chatbots to automate customer support

5. Sentiment

How do your customers feel about your brand?

Happy? Unsatisfied? Neutral?

You can’t really tell based on a few likes and shares now, can you?

With social monitoring tools like Brandwatch, you can gauge the sentiment surrounding your brand.

If you don’t have a tool in place, it will require some manual work to assess sentiment. That said, it might very well be worth the effort to take your audience’s temperature once in a while. It’s invaluable feedback for your social strategy, your product team, your sales department… I could go on.

That’s a wrap

I’m sure the next time your boss asks you to bring numbers to the table, you’d take the opportunity to go above and beyond the vanity metrics (likes, shares, and comments) and talk about data that actually matters.

But are you prepared to answer questions related to your return-on-investment from social? 

So, how do you answer questions like these from your boss?

  • How are the social channels contributing to the overall business? 
  • Can you demonstrate the value of social media marketing to our company?
  • What is our return-on-investment?
  • Can you show us some numbers?

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!

We wrote an eBook that covers everything from conducting a social media audit to setting KPIs and aligning with overarching business goals. It’s full of examples and inspiration so you can prove the worth of your social media efforts.

The How to measure your Social Media ROI is for marketers, such as yourself, to demonstrate the value of social media marketing to your company. Download the free eBook today and discover how calculating social media ROI helps in quantifying the value of your social efforts.