MARKETING
15 Social Media Marketing Metrics You Need to Track
Social media marketing is one of the most important aspects of any online marketing strategy. It allows businesses to connect with current and potential customers in a way that wasn’t possible before.
With more and more social media platforms popping up regularly, there are many ways that a brand can connect with its audience through social media.
But, like any other marketing strategy, tracking your social media marketing campaigns and the associated ROI is much needed to determine their effectiveness.
In this guide, we will look at 15 social media marketing metrics you need to track and measure the success of your campaigns.
Why Metrics Are Important To Optimize Social Media Campaigns
Social media allows businesses to share content with a broad audience and build a connection with existing (and potential) customers. This content may range from blog posts to images to videos and beyond.
And by sharing this content, businesses will help their customers learn more about them, what they stand for, and what they have to offer.
Creating a rich and engaging social media presence helps amplify your brand in a way that other digital marketing campaigns, such as paid search, could never provide.
But it’s not easy.
There are many objectives of social media marketing. Still, some of the most important ones include increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to websites or landing pages, and increasing leads or sales. This can be done using organic social media or paid campaigns.
Beyond the noticeable budgetary differences, the main difference between organic and paid social media is that organic social media relies on the platform and the audience to amplify the content.
Of course, every brand wants its posts to go viral–in a good way. However, according to SocialInsider, organic reach continues to decline on some of the most popular platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram.
On the other hand, paid social media involves paying for ads to be placed in front of a specific audience. Although a cost is involved, it provides much more control over who and how many people see your posts or ads.
Like PPC vs. SEO, both paid and organic social media have advantages and disadvantages.
Organic social media marketing is less expensive, but it may be difficult to reach a large audience without paid promotions. In contrast, paid social media marketing allows you to target a specific audience with your ads, which often results in a higher conversion rate. However, it may be costly to maintain a paid social media campaign for the long haul, especially with multiple products to support.
Overall, the best approach is possibly a combination of organic and paid social media marketing. This will allow you to reach the largest audience possible while still targeting the right people with your ads.
However, publishing a few ads and building a social following is not enough to drive social success. To drive home your message, you need to understand more about who is seeing, engaging with, and clicking on your social content.
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But, regardless of whether you’re using organic, paid social media, or both, it’s crucial to track your metrics to optimize your campaigns and ensure they are successful. This information is beneficial for businesses to optimize their social media campaigns for even greater success.
But before we get into the specific social media metrics you should be tracking, let’s look at why tracking social media analytics is vital for optimizing your campaigns.
Tracking social media marketing metrics allows you to:
- Identify what content and strategies are performing well
- Make improvements to underperforming content and strategies
- Evaluate the overall success of your social media marketing efforts
- Justify the investment in social media marketing to stakeholders
Top 15 Social Media Metrics That Matter
Now that we understand the importance of tracking social media metrics, let’s dive into the 15 key metrics you should be monitoring, broken down by the customer lifecycle stage.
Awareness Metrics
Awareness metrics are important because they help businesses track how well they achieve their goal of increasing brand awareness.
By tracking how many people see their posts and how much reach they get, businesses will see whether their social media marketing campaigns are even getting in front of their intended audience. After all, if people don’t see the ad, they have no way to engage with it.
Social media awareness metrics typically include:
- Reach: The number of unique users who saw your content
- Impressions: The number of times your content was displayed, regardless of whether it was clicked on or not
- Social media mentions: The number of times your brand was mentioned on social media
- Follower Growth Rate: The increase in the size of your social media following
These metrics give you insights into the visibility and reach of your content.
Consideration Metrics
Consideration metrics are important because they help businesses track how well they achieve their goal of getting people to consider their product or service. This block of metrics takes the user one step further down the purchase journey and helps determine if what you share resonates with them.
By tracking how many people are clicking on their links, watching their videos, or reading their blog posts, businesses are in a better position to decipher whether their social media marketing campaigns are effective or not.
Social media consideration metrics typically include:
- Engagement: The number of interactions with your content, including likes, comments, shares, and clicks
- Engagement Per Follower: Breaking down the metric above by the followers of that particular channel. This will help show how engaged your following is.
- Website traffic from social media: This metric measures how much website traffic is driven to your site through social media channels.
- Click-through Rate (CTR): This measures the number of clicks a link in your social media content receives, divided by the number of impressions it receives.
These metrics show how well your audience connects with and considers your content.
Conversion Metrics
Conversion metrics help businesses monitor how well they achieve their goal of converting leads into customers. By keeping an eye on the number of prospects or customers generated from social media, it’s easier to figure out whether social media marketing campaigns are attracting the right audience.
Social media conversion metrics typically include:
- Social media leads: The number of leads generated through social media channels.
- Social media sales: The number of purchases that are attributed to social media channels
- Goal Value: A monetary value assigned to each goal, which could include an estimated value per new lead or the revenue generated from an online transaction
- Return on investment (ROI): This metric measures the overall return on investment for your social media marketing efforts, taking into account all other metrics and their impact on sales and revenue.
These metrics demonstrate the impact of your social media efforts on achieving business goals.
Advocacy Metrics
Advocacy metrics are essential because they help businesses see how successful they have been in getting customers to become advocates for their products or service.
A social media report template helps monitor the following business metrics:
- The number of followers a business has,
- The number of shares a post has, and
- The amount of positive sentiment a post has received.
Tracking this data is essential for companies to understand whether their social media marketing campaigns effectively turn customers into loyal advocates for the brand.
Social media advocacy metrics typically include:
- Reviews: Social proof is still an essential part of any sales process, so the number of reviews (both positive and negative) on social platforms is worth tracking
- Customer satisfaction: The level of satisfaction expressed by customers on social media, such as adding reinforcing comments to posts
- Brand sentiment: The overall perception and sentiment towards your brand on social media
These metrics (although harder to measure) showcase how well your social media presence fosters brand loyalty and advocacy.
Summary & Key Takeaways
The 15 social media marketing metrics listed in this guide are crucial for businesses to measure the success of their social media marketing campaigns.
By tracking awareness, consideration, conversion, and advocacy metrics, businesses are more informed to understand what’s working well and what needs improvement or tweaks.
Additionally, connecting the dots between social media performance and the resulting web traffic, leads, and sales help businesses correlate social media marketing efforts with their bottom line.
MARKETING
How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals
A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.
The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.
The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).
Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.
Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.
So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.
1. See journalists as your audience
Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.
Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.
“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”
Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.”
Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”
Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.”
2. Learn the media outlet’s audience
Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).
PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.
WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’”
3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)
Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.
“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”
At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”
While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”
BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”
4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency
Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.
At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.
Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.
“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”
5. Measure what matters
Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.
“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”
To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:
- Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
- Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
- Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
- On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.
But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.
“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”
Don’t fear the merger
Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”
But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
MARKETING
Trends in Content Localization – Moz
Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.
Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.
Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.
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