8 Most Useful Social Media Analytics Metrics For Small Businesses

8 Most Useful Social Media Analytics Metrics For Small Businesses

For successful business promotion, social media has almost become a need. A company’s reach is significantly limited if it does have or if it does not use the most popular social media channels related to their target audiences. An effective marketing is the one that reaches clients where they are.

However, having a Facebook Page or a LinkedIn account is insufficient. To maximise social effect and produce the highest return on investment using these channels, precise procedures must be followed. Hire a social media expert for a smooth process to optimize your social media reach.

Analyzing your performance can be simple with the correct tools. This allows you to focus your time, effort, and budget more effectively. To ensure that a social marketing campaign is attaining its full potential, tracking the correct metrics is must.

It is much easier to respond to mistakes and successes and foster the finest execution of social media marketing when a business’s marketing plan involves tracking these indicators. Concentrate on the data that matters—the figures that show your efforts have had a positive influence on the company’s bottom line.

This blog outlines the most essential metrics, explains why they’re important, and shows how to track them. Along with some recommendations for the same; free and paid, both.

Break Down Of Social Funnel

Break Down Of Social Funnel

To understand Social Funnel, you’ll have to understand marketing funnel first because that’s the basis of it. So, Marketing Funnel is a path that your customers travel through. From the initial stages when somebody finds out about your business to the buying stage, marketing funnels map routes to conversion and beyond it.

With careful analysis, a marketing funnel lets you know what your company must do to influence consumers at a certain stage. It begins the second they become mindful of your brand and proceeds until after they make a buy. The social media marketing funnel ends with a customer becoming a staunch advocate of your brand.

The marketing funnel functions as a whole. Friction in the journey is decreased when each phase works toward a specific purpose, resulting in a customer journey that continues to establish trust with your audience and improve brand awareness.

The most widely recognized social media sales funnel structure, and the one that applies to most organizations, comprises of five stages:

  1. Awareness – Attracting new audiences who are unaware of your brand currently.

The first step in the social media marketing funnel is for potential clients to discover your business and become aware of its existence.

As a company, you should be able to identify a problem that your target audience needs assistance with. Even if your target audience is unfamiliar with your brand, you can connect with them by providing a solution to a common issue.

This is not the time to make a hard sell on your products or services. The purpose is to provide value and assistance. This content should be useful enough for potential buyers to remember your brand and want to learn more about you.

  1. Consideration – Standing out among your competition so that new audience members remember you.

As customers progress through the marketing funnel, they begin to seek out more particular information while deciding whether to purchase your product or service. This includes investigating why you are superior to your rivals.

You provide more specific information during the consideration phase to guide potential clients towards the action phase. Providing relevant content to potential consumers, such as case studies or webinars, can assist in creating trust during this stage.

According to the Sprout Social Index, 45 percent of consumers are more likely to explore a product or service if a relatable person, such as an employee, posts about it, and 32 percent react similarly when a celebrity or influencer posts about the same thing.

  1. Action – Evoking interest in your audience to take action and make an order.

Customers should be amenable to being sold to at this step of the funnel if you’ve developed the relationship up to this point. Examine your analytics data to observe how the majority of your audience interacted with the previous phases.

It’s easier to use a social media management software like Sprout Social during this stage. These analytics and reporting tools track your data and determine whether your sponsored social media advertising received enough interaction, allowing you to know if you’re on track to meet your goals from the beginning of the funnel.

  1. Engagement –  To stay top-of-mind of your audience using social media and keeping them engaged after they’ve purchased.

It’s critical not to lose sight of your target market once you’ve closed the deal. It’s customary for brands to spend less effort on this section of the funnel.

It may appear that once a customer makes a purchase, they are a lifelong devotee, but this is not always the case. To stay top of mind, you must continue to maintain the relationship.

Maintain contact with your customers and make them feel a member of your brand community. Create social media material that encourages people to buy depending on their purchase.

  1. Advocacy – Building enough trust with your audience that they want to recommend you to others.

Following your customer’s purchase, you’ve made the sale and added value. It’s time to take the funnel to the next level. Now is the time to turn your customers from fans to brand evangelists.

Customers should be thanked and rewarded for spreading the word about your company. Collect client testimonials and reviews, or provide incentives for customers to tell their friends about their experience.

Make it simple for customers to share their experiences and become brand advocates. Allow clients to express their gratitude by posting reviews or testimonials on your website or Facebook Business Page.

Work with existing customers or power users to develop material throughout the advocacy phase.

Shopify collaborates with users to publish blog posts that detail how they utilise the platform. This information functions as a case study and portrays the user as a brand advocate. Shopify gains social proof that they may use as marketing content, and the user earns visibility for their brand.

What are Social Media Metrics?

What are Social Media Metrics?

Your social media goals determine your metrics. Every goal should be accompanied by a statistic that can be used to judge whether your social strategy is on track.

Let’s say, one of your company’s goals is to increase conversions. As a result, your social media goal should be to increase conversions from visitors to your site through postings that are part of your strategy. You can clearly specify the social media indicators to measure and a time frame in which to measure them now that you have a goal in mind.

For example, in a three-month period, increasing social conversions by 25%. You decide to execute a campaign that includes commercials, product tags, and influencers to achieve this aim. To do so, you decide to use your website analytics to look at the social traffic and conversion rate metrics from those postings.

Social media metrics are significant because they demonstrate that you can assess the success of a campaign, the effectiveness of your social strategy, and, ultimately, whether you will have an impact on your total organisation.

Having these metrics not only allows you to demonstrate the impact of your work to executives, but giving consistent social media metric reports can lead to big changes for your social team, such as more budget and resource availability.

Finally, metrics keep you educated about the overall general health of your social profile and brand – you will not have a clue about the effect of your social media presence until you have the proof to back it up.

Every site has its own set of built-in analytics that you may explore. You’ll find them under the Insights tab on Facebook. You get to Twitter Analytics from Twitter. Before you can see your statistics on Instagram and Pinterest, you’ll need a business account.

Importance Of Tracking Social Media Metrics

Tracking leads and converting customers through social media activities can be accomplished by investing in analytics tools and services. Furthermore, you will not only save money and increase revenues for your company, but you will also obtain a better understanding of your audience, which will lead to long-term, healthy customer connections.

  1. Timing is the Key

The importance of timing in social media marketing cannot be overstated. You don’t just publish whenever you want and appear to your audience as a social media wall flooder. To increase interaction, site traffic, leads, and purchases, post when your target audiences are actively online.

You’ll gain a better understanding of your target audience thanks to social media analytics. You can decide the optimum moment to share by reviewing your previous postings and relevant social data.

Some social media platforms, such as Facebook, make it simple to do so by providing the hours and days when the majority of your fan page followers or target audience are online via built-in analytics in the ‘Post’ area of your insights.

  1. In-Depth Analysis

You’ll be able to examine your social media at the highest level with the help of a Social Media Audit Template, allowing you and your team to make better social media marketing decisions. You’ll be able to conduct a deep dive study and understand the effects of key social media marketing KPIs thanks to analytics.

Knowing your analytics will allow you to take effective and actionable steps based on the data from your wall post interaction. It gives bits of knowledge into the best content pieces that hit the mark based on a branding viewpoint.

You may compare your current content strategy to that of your competitors using this in-depth research to ensure that you’re always one step ahead.

  1. Create the Best Content

When it comes to content marketing and social media marketing, it’s always a team effort. You’ll be able to see what themes or content produce the best results if you use social media analytics.

You’ll also be able to see how links, infographics (text-based graphic pictures), audio, videos, and photographs affect your metrics.

Social media analytics allow you to assess the performance of your blog by determining what content is most frequently liked and shared, the amount of time visitors spend traversing your page, and the number of visitors who become paying customers.

  1. Know Your Best Social Media Networks

While there are many social media networks to pick from to communicate with your audience and post your content, not all work flawlessly for any niche or business. Driving results is well beyond joining a multi-million-member social networking platform.

Smaller networks, such as Flickr or Pinterest, may actually be more beneficial to your marketing plan. That’s why experimenting with the ideal social media network for you and evaluating your traffic, engagement, and sales requires the use of social media analytics.

  1. Create Better Social Media Marketing Strategies

Many people fail to create the finest social media marketing strategy on their first try, making various blunders and employing unproductive approaches. It is, however, easier to establish the reasons for mistakes or errors if you use and evaluate social media analytics on a daily basis.

Once you’ve figured out how to optimise your social media marketing techniques, you can keep the ones that are working, tweak the ones that need to be tweaked, and eliminate or cease doing the ones that aren’t.

8 Useful Analytics Metrics to track

Some of the most crucial and useful matrices are as follows:

●     Audience Growth Rate

This metric tracks the rate at which your brand’s social media following grows. It’s all about how quickly you can amass a following.

As the world’s population gains access to the internet, so will the number of people who follow businesses on social media. Focus on, “How many net new followers did we get last month?”, ask “How quickly did we gain net new followers last month—and was it faster than our competition?”

Follow the steps given below:

STEP 1: Over a reporting period, track your net new followers (on each network).

STEP 2: To calculate your audience growth rate percentage, divide your net new followers by your total audience (on each platform) and multiply by 100.

Also: In the same way, you may keep track of your competitors’ development.

●     Post Reach

The number of individuals who have seen a post since it went live is called post reach.

This measure is simple to locate and even simpler to comprehend. Most importantly, it’s actionable, as it’s influenced by your post’s timing (i.e., when is your audience online?) and content (i.e., what does your audience value?).

Follow the steps given below:

STEP 1: Count the number of people who have seen a particular post.

STEP 2: To calculate your post reach percentage, divide the reach by your total number of followers and multiply by 100.

Also: The “When Your Fans Are Online” tool on Facebook will advise you the best time to publish. Make use of this information to broaden your audience.

●     Social Share of Voice (SSoV)

In comparison to your competition, social share of voice gauges how many people discuss your brand on social media.

It can be mentioned in either ways:

  1. Direct
  1. Indirect

SSoV is a competitive examination in essence: how visible—and thus relevant—is your brand in the market?

Follow the steps given below:

STEP 1: Measure every mention of your brand on social media, both direct and indirect.

STEP 2: During the same reporting period, track your competitors’ mentions.

STEP 3: To get the total industry mentions, include your mentions and those of your competitors.

STEP 4: To calculate your SSoV percentage, divide your brand mentions by the grand total and multiply by 100.

Also: This procedure will be aided by the use of social media analytics tools.

●     Average Engagement Rate

The amount of engagement actions (e.g., likes, shares, and comments) a post receives in relation to the total number of followers is known as the average engagement rate.

Higher engagement shows your content is resonating with the audience, thus it’s a crucial statistic. Track the engagement rate of each post to demonstrate this. The quantity of likes, shares, and comments is meaningless if you have a high engagement rate.

Follow the steps given below:

STEP 1: Add up the total number of likes, comments, and shares for a post.

STEP 2: To get your average engagement rate percentage, divide your entire number of followers by 100.

Also: Every platform has a separate standard for this statistic.

Facebook and Twitter, for example, have lower interaction rates than other social media platforms (e.g., 0.5 percent to 1 percent ). Instagram, on the other hand, is known for having a high rate of engagement (e.g., 3 percent to 6 percent ).

●     Conversion rate

The amount of visitors who take action on a page (e.g., subscribe to your newsletter, download a gated content asset, or register for a webinar) after clicking on a link in your post is referred to as the conversion rate.

A high conversion rate indicates that your content is valuable and engaging to your intended audience. It’s a sign that your post was relevant to the offer from the aspect of social media. To put it another way, it delivered on its promise.

Follow the steps given below:

STEP 1: Make a post that includes a call-to-action link. To make it trackable, use a URL shortener.

STEP 2: Create a “cookie” on the user’s computer. This associates the lead with a campaign.

STEP 3: Track the total number of clicks and conversions generated by the post using campaign reporting.

STEP 4: To calculate your conversion rate %, divide conversions by total clicks and multiply by 100.

Also: Even if traffic is minimal, a post’s conversion rate can be high. Both measurements are mutually exclusive.

●     Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The CTR, or click-through rate, is the percentage of people who click on the call-to-action link in your post.

Your CTR is not to be confused with other forms of engagement (e.g., shares, likes, and comments), but rather with a link that directs the viewer to additional information.

Tracking CTR on a regular and precise basis can provide you with essential information about how appealing your offer is to your target audience.

Follow the steps given below:

STEP 1: Calculate the total number of clicks on a post’s link.

STEP 2: Calculate the overall number of impressions for that particular content.

STEP 3: To calculate your CTR %, divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions and multiply by 100.

Also: Remember to track both clicks and impressions during the same reporting period.

 

●     Bounce Rate

The percentage of page visitors who click on a link in your post only to exit the page without taking action is known as the bounce rate.

Bounce rate allows you to compare your social media traffic (and, as a result, ROI) to traffic from other sources (e.g., traffic from a Facebook post vs. traffic from an organic Google search).

If your social media bounce rate is lower than other sources, it means your social media initiatives are reaching the correct people and, as a result, bringing in high-value visitors.

Follow the steps given below:

STEP 1: Sign in and set-up your Google Analytics.

STEP 2: Open the “Acquisition” tab and look for the “Channels” segment under “All Traffic.”

STEP 3: Click the “Bounce Rate” button, and all of the channels will be ranked from lowest to maximum bounce rate.

Also: Demonstrating the relative efficacy of your social media initiatives will go a long way toward demonstrating its business worth.

●     Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

The amount you pay every individual click on your sponsored social media post is known as the cost-per-click, or CPC.

Don’t focus on your entire budget while advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Linkedin. Instead, concentrate on your CPC. It will assist you in determining whether your attention investment is efficient or inefficient.

Follow the steps given below:

STEP 1: Check the Ad Manager on your platform.

STEP 2: Check it on a regular basis.

Also: Allowing your CPC campaigns to go unmanaged for an extended period of time is never a good idea.

Social Media Analytics Tools

Theoretically put, the practise of tracking, collecting, and evaluating data from social media networks is known as social media analytics. It’s a very crucial tool that marketers use to analyse social media performance, track key social media data, and generate social media reports.

Simply put it’s a tool to collect and organize the acquired data using the above matrices. So here are a few very interesting uses of social media analytics:

  • You can use the social media data you’ve gathered to narrow down the social networks that are right for you.
  • Connecting to many social media networks and storing data in a single dashboard allows you to compare performance more quickly and easily.
  • The information can be used to determine the appropriate amount of time to devote to each social media network. For example, you can devote more time or effort to high-performing social media networks that produce better outcomes.
  • All of the social media platforms where your company is active. This method is beneficial for creating long-term goals and evaluating the impact of your social media presence on your business.

Here’s a combination of some of the best tools; paid and free, that may help you be more effective and efficient in your social media marketing campaign:

1. Hootsuite Analytics

Hootsuite Analytics provides a centralised view of all of your social media initiatives. This makes your job with social media analytics a lot easier. It saves time and makes comparing aggregate results across networks much easier.

For each of your social posts, you’ll notice essential stats, such as:

  • Clicks
  • Reach
  • Shares
  • Comments
  • Video reach
  • Video views

You’ll also see analytics for each of your profiles, such as the number of followers you’ve gained over time. You can choose the metrics that are most important to you so that you can see all relevant findings at once.

You can measure, evaluate, and monitor your performance on each social network using the customisable templates. As a consequence, you’ll have a simple, easy-to-understand social media analytics report to share with your team, clients, or supervisor.

Hootsuite Analytics also gives you a clear image of your social media team’s performance data, such as:

  • Productivity
  • Response time
  • Time for assigned posts, mentions, and comments to be resolved.

Key features: Analyze customer demographics and brand sentiment in real time.

1.1. Hootsuite Insights

Hootsuite Insights is a strong social listening and analytics tool from Hootsuite. It measures social sentiment by analysing your earned social mentions. You can also study data regarding your audience demographics with Hootsuite Insights. Gender, geography, and language are all important audience characteristics.

All of this data provides you with a clear picture of how consumers perceive your brand. This is essential data for a successful social media analytics report. This is the information that determines whether a spike in mentions is a success or a failure.

Why should you look into what people are saying about your company on social media? It highlights crucial ways to contact your target audience where they already spend time online discussing your business and products.

2. Google Analytics

One of the most effective ways to discover more about your website’s visitors is to use Google Analytics. While it isn’t specifically a social media reporting tool, it can be used to create reports that can help you:

  • Check out which social media sites are bringing you the most visitors.
  • Calculate the return on investment (ROI) of your social media marketing.
  • Examine which kind of material works best on specific social media platforms.
  • Using demographic data, make sure you’re attracting the correct audience on social media.
  • Check out how many leads and other conversions your company receives through social media.

You’ll be able to get the most out of your social media initiatives and properly strategize for the future with this information.

2.1 UTM Parameters

UTM parameters aren’t a stand-alone social media analytics tool, but they’re crucial for setting up Google Analytics (or another web analytics platform) to track social media performance.

Simply put, UTM parameters are brief pieces of code that are applied to social network connections. They provide you with exact information about how many people interact with your content and visit your website.

If you’re merely interested in reporting on social media performance in terms of interaction, followers, and so on, UTM parameters aren’t necessary. However, combining UTM parameters with Google Analytics will provide you with more accurate information on which social media content and channels drive traffic and conversions.

You also don’t need to know how to code in order to use them in your social media posts. UTM settings may be generated automatically in seconds if you use a social media management tool like Hootsuite.

Key features: Analyze how much traffic and conversions your social media channels and campaigns produce on the web (to be used with a web analytics platform like Google Analytics)

Bottom Line is that the scope of your analysis can be as shallow or broad as you need it to be, varying on your respective goals and insights you want. And these combinations of tools paid and free shall help you get the best out of this piece of technology.

Conclusion

Of course, Traditional sales funnels have a place in the world. However, social media marketing funnels may help you engage your audience, build trust, and grow an authentic fan following.

Marketers frequently make the error of investing in only a few of these stages rather than all of them. People who are unfamiliar with your brand may be put off by this type of promotion. If you’re concerned about your funnel’s limited resources, choose one or two methods to focus on for each step.

Including the appropriate steps in your client journey will aid in your company’s continued growth. You’re creating a loyal fan base rather than a customer list. And amongst those steps incorporate all the crucial and relevant social media matrices.

Followed by a full strategy of using those matrices to analyse your social media campaign. Here, social media analytics will assist you in determining the best content to attract the attention of your target audience. You may easily adjust or correct your social media campaigns if things aren’t working according to plan.

You’ll be able to track the essential metrics that have a big impact on your sales and marketing goals with social media analytics. Using such a tool can assist you in making better social media marketing selections and avoiding wasting time on ineffective techniques.

Author Bio

Hetvi works as a Product Associate at Refrens – India’s most powerful platform for freelancer’s finances and growth. She has worked for some renowned companies as a Brand and Digital marketing associate. You can follow Refrens on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.

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