The way we communicate has been changed by digitalization and also by the growing use of social media platforms. There are around 4,7 billion internet users worldwide. Most of them are using social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. Therefore, social media offers great potential for your marketing.
Social signals help you to see which of your posts generate engagement from your followers in the form of likes, shares, and comments. You can use this data to review specific campaigns and optimize your social media marketing.
In this blog post I’ll show you
- what are social media metrics,
- which metrics are important for your social media posts,
- how to use social media metrics to optimize your marketing strategy.
What are social media metrics?
Social media metrics, or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), are metrics you can use to assess how successful a social media strategy is. More precisely, it shows you exactly how successful a single social media post is. The social media metrics can be prioritized and selected according to your (business) goals and serve their purpose.
There are qualitative and quantitative metrics. Quantitative metrics include for example the number of followers, likes, shares, retweets, comments, etc.
Qualitative metrics measure how people react to the content of the post. Is the feedback positive or negative, do people love, criticize or miss something?
In this blogpost, we will focus on quantitative metrics.
Which social media metrics are important for your social media posts?
If you like to analyze the performance of your social media posts, take a look at the following metrics:
- Impressions: A count of how many times the post has been viewed.
- Link clicks: A count of link clicks, to further content.
- Likes: A count of how many times the post has been liked.
- Re-Shares/ Re-Tweets: A count of how many times the post has been reshared or retweeted.
- Comments: A count of how many times the post has been replied to.
How to use social media metrics to optimize your marketing strategy?
Metrics are valuable indicators to assess how well a post is received by followers and readers and how users engage with it, like or share the content. To make sure you grow your community and reach your goals, it pays back, if you regularly check your metrics on your social media accounts across all platforms. This helps you to
- keep track of which posts, topics, campaigns work well
- adjust any laps in your social media strategy
- identify trends and challenges to implement into your future campaigns.
Platforms that reach so many people in real-time can open new avenues for lead generation, increase brand awareness, and increase sales. Analyzing the performance of your posts therefore proves to be a good way to adapt and optimize your social media marketing and grow your business.
How to get social media metrics?
Some networks, like Facebook and Instagram, offer their own tools to get insights. However, it can be very time-consuming to check the performance of your posts in each network separately. A social media metrics analysing tool is a good way to reduce this work and save time you can better invest in optimizing your strategy.
The WordPress plugin Blog2Social is a social media automation tool that enables you to manage your entire social media scheduling and sharing directly from your WordPress dashboard across multiple social platforms. You can schedule and share your website content, your blog posts, and product posts. You can also create and share any other social media posts consisting of texts, links, images, and videos automatically. A social media calendar shows you an overview of all scheduled posts. And, with the Social Media Metrics Add-on you can track the performance of all your social media posts you shared with Blog2Social – all in one tool.
With Blog2Social you can track the following metrics (depending on the data availability of each social network):
- Impressions: A count of how many times the post has been viewed.
- Link clicks: A count of link clicks, to further content.
- Likes: A count of how many times the post has been liked.
- Re-Shares/ Re-Tweets: A count of how many times the post has been reshared or retweeted.
- Comments: A count of how many times the post has been replied to.
How to optimize your marketing strategy with social media metrics?
Social media marketing should be used to serve your (business) goals. Social media metrics help you to assess how successful a specific campaign, your topics are, in each single post.
Let’s take a closer look at what you can do to even achieve social signals and use the data to optimize your social media strategy.
1. Share high quality content
The social media metrics make it easy to see which social media post is performing well. However, you first need to reach your audience on social media at all to get those social signals. To do so, it is important to publish good content that brings value to your readers. Share high quality content that leads your readers to interact and to give feedback by keeping the following points in mind:
✔ Look for inspiration on relevant industry channels, blogs, newsletters, or from the comments of your followers. Can you pick up on a current topic, is there a gap in coverage you can fill, or are there questions you can answer?
✔ Pimp your content by using multimedia, since visuals like photos, infographics, videos, GIFs, etc., can improve 200% more shares and engagement.
More facts: Tweets receive 150% more retweets for posts with images than without. On LinkedIn posts with images generate a 98% higher comment rate. These are social signals you need to boost the ranking of your posts.
✔ Customize your posts with individual comments, hashtags, handles, and emojis to invite your followers to engage with you.
2. Share your posts at the best times on social media
The time of publishing can play a decisive role in achieving engagement. Posting at the time when your audience is most active will help you to generate more social signals. So get as many likes, shares, and comments as well as a wide reach posting at the time your readers are online.
The following infographic provides you with the perfect starting point for the right timing. Use the suggested days and times for orientation. Please note that weekdays differ from weekends.
3. Track the performance of your posts
Start sharing your posts at the best times and monitor what happens over time. Use different post formats and share them to the same conditions (same time of day and same day of the week).
Track how often a post was commented on, re-shared and liked. Then you can analyze how well a post has performed or not to use the results for your further strategy and optimize your social media marketing.
Conclusion
As you can see, the social media metrics provide many options for optimizing your social media marketing. You get feedback in a different way from your followers, readers, customers and you can use it to see the success of your posts and discover trends. As more and more people around the world get access to the internet, the presence on social media will continue to grow. So take the chance, and track the performance of your social media posts now!