If you maintain active social media accounts for your business (which you definitely should!), metrics matter. Even if you don’t run paid ad campaigns on these social platforms, it would be counterintuitive to put time and effort into something that doesn’t yield positive results. However, with so many different ways to measure social media performance, it can be difficult for retailers to know which strategies are the most beneficial.
In this quick guide, we’ll cover 5 of the best ways to determine the effectiveness of your social marketing tactics. After tracking these metrics, you’ll have all the insights you need to create better campaigns, attract more followers, and grow your business.
1. Social Media Reach
Your “reach” includes the number of people that have seen your ad or content. Depending on your social media goals, you can look at the comprehensive results of an entire ad campaign, or you can look into the reach of individual posts. For example, using Facebook Insights is a convenient way for merchants to track the total number of impressions for both organic and paid posts.
You don’t necessarily need tools to track your social media reach if your goal is to simply build a larger audience base. Some retailers simply track the total number of followers they attract on their social media platforms to gauge which channel is the most popular for their target demographic.
2. Cost Per Conversion
If you run any paid ads, tracking this metric is crucial. Cost per conversion measures the average number of clicks it takes to generate one conversion. Since you have to pay every time someone clicks on an ad, you want to make sure that your cost per conversion is low. Most social platforms will track this for you, but keeping an eye on it will clearly show you if it’s a cost-effective campaign.
3. Amplification Rate
Author and digital marketing evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, first coined the term “amplification rate” and defined it as, “the rate at which your followers take your content and share it through their networks.” In short, the amplification rate can be determined by the number of shares or re-tweets a social media post receives.
Amplification is basically free advertising for your business; your followers are sharing your content on their own pages to an entirely new audience! This can boost your online visibility, attract new customers, and further establish your company’s credibility. Unfortunately, the capability to track amplification isn’t built into most social platforms, but you can measure it yourself with a simple formula:
- Note the number of times a post is shared.
- Divide this number by the total amount of followers you have.
- Multiply by 100.
4. Referrals
When you track referral traffic, you’re looking at how many people are visiting your website after clicking a link on your social media page. Most retailers gain a significant amount of traffic through social media referrals, and reviewing this metric can help you create more effective CTA captions.
Referrals can be easily measured if you use Google Analytics. Simply go to the “Acquisition” tab, click on “Social,” and you’ll get to see which platforms are driving the most web traffic to your online store.
5. Engagements
Like social media reach, tracking engagement can be done in a number of different ways. You can gauge engagement by how much your followers are interacting with your content through likes, comments, re-tweets, or shares. On Twitter, you can see a full report that tracks the total number of engagements per post or on your entire page. You can even look into the specificity of which kinds of engagements a certain post received. This information can help you determine what kind of content your audience interacts with and enjoys the most.
