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If you’ve ever labored over a fantastic video for LinkedIn, but no one liked or commented on it, you must’ve felt that utter disappointment. When social media users don’t engage with your content in the way you expect, it makes you feel like the kid in gym class who gets picked last for kickball.
Unlike gym class, though, social media has metrics to help you improve your content. That’s the beauty of digital platforms. They’re trackable on every level.
If brand awareness is sorted, thanks to your excellent social media plan, engagement is the next stage of the funnel to focus your attention on. You can use engagement metrics to help you understand how audiences are responding to your content. For example, you could learn who likes your posts, why certain people are responding, and how long they spend on your social pages.
Information like this helps you shape your output to meet the content needs of your target audience. Don’t feel discouraged by your lack of clicks. There are always valuable insights you can gather from social media engagement metrics. But like most things in digital marketing, there are a ton of metrics to familiarize yourself with. Let’s focus on the top thirteen metrics that matter.
Understanding the sales funnel
Before we unpack engagement, it helps to understand where it fits into the sales funnel along with your strategic marketing plan. The sales funnel is a model that represents the customer’s journey. It starts from simply being aware of your product or service, all the way to making the final purchase.
The sales funnel helps marketers understand and track the various stages of a customer’s interaction with your content. It’s fundamental to address every stage with relevant content pieces. More importantly, you need to know which metrics to measure within each level.
Stages of a sales funnel
The typical funnel includes the following:
Awareness
This is the first stage where your potential customer becomes aware of your product or service. Top tactics for awareness include content marketing, various social media ads, search engine optimization, and influencer marketing.
Interest
At this stage, your potential customer is interested in learning more about your product or service. They may search for more information, compare your company’s offerings with competitors, or request more information. You’ve got their attention!
Consideration
At this level, the potential customer evaluates the company’s product or service, considering more granular factors like price, features, or benefits. They are likely to seek out customer reviews, recommendations, and feedback.
Intent
At this stage, your potential customer is seriously considering making a purchase. They might add your product to their cart, sign up for a free trial, or even request a demo.
Evaluation
At this point, your potential customer is genuinely weighing up the pros and cons of making a purchase. They’ve engaged with multiple pieces of content, adding various products to their cart. They’re almost at the finish line! Here’s where you need to nurture your customers, giving them every reason to make decisions.
Purchase
Victory! The customer makes a purchase, feeding back into the funnel under a new classification.
Loyalty
After making a purchase, you want your customer to become a loyal, returning customer. Better yet, you want them to refer your product or service to others. This is a whole funnel in itself!
Various social media engagement metrics allow you to track everything from awareness and interest to intent, evaluation, and purchase. We’ll unpack those later, but remember to keep the funnel top-of-mind.
The benefits of tracking social media engagement metrics
Tracking social media engagement metrics is critical for your business because it provides insights into how your audience reacts to your content. Of all the social media metrics, engagement is the most “qualitative.” It gives you a good indication of general sentiment toward your product or brand, which is valuable insight to any marketer.
The top benefits of monitoring engagement include:
1. Understanding audience behavior
You can understand what type of content resonates with your audience by tracking engagement metrics, such as likes, comments, shares, and clicks. Better yet, you can understand which social media platforms are the most effective for reaching them, allowing you to streamline your marketing efforts.
2. Measuring the impact of marketing campaigns
Engagement metrics can help you measure the success of any social media marketing campaigns you run, allowing you to unpack your return on investment. This information can be used to make data-driven decisions about future campaigns.
3. Improving engagement
This might seem counter-intuitive, but you can use engagement metrics to improve your engagement metrics. They provide valuable insights into your audience, allowing you to test and learn from multiple strategies, continually fine-tuning your most successful approach.
4. Improving customer experience:
Engagement metrics can help you understand how customers interact with your brand on social media, including the most common customer service issues and how they can be addressed.
5. Benchmarking and competitive analysis:
By tracking engagement metrics, you can compare your performance on social media against competitors, giving you an understanding of where you sit in the mix.
Social media engagement metrics that matter
1. Reach
Reach is significant for you to track when monitoring social media engagement metrics because it measures the number of people who have seen a post or content. This metric is crucial for understanding how far your message is spreading and the potential impact you can have on your target audience.
If employee advocacy is one of your core campaigns, reach is a fundamental metric to monitor. It gives you the crucial parameters you need to analyze engagement accurately.
2. Impressions
Impressions indicate the number of times a piece of content has been seen by users on a platform. This metric is crucial because it provides insight into how many people have the potential to see and engage with a particular post.
You can see how effectively you’re reaching your target audience by tracking impressions. If your post isn’t getting the number of impressions you expected (or is costing you more than expected), your relevance score is likely to be low. This is a good initial indicator that your content needs tweaking.
Tracking impressions can help you determine the value of your social media presence and the return on investment for your marketing efforts. By knowing how many people are seeing your content, you can calculate the cost per impression.
Hot Tip: You’ll use both reach and impression numbers to help you calculate most of your engagement metrics. It’s worth understanding what they mean and tracking them as part of your strategy.
3.Likes
Likes on social media platforms still serve as an important measure of engagement. Tracking likes can indicate how a particular post or piece of content was received. On platforms like Facebook, likes have evolved from the thumbs up to several reactions, including hearts, smiley faces, or laughing faces. Analyzing these emojis gives you a holistic view of how the content was perceived. For instance, if you didn’t intend for it to be humorous, it would be alarming for most of the reactions to be laughing faces.
4. Comments
Comments allow you to track a deeper level of engagement with a particular post or piece of content. Unlike likes, which are a simple way for users to express their appreciation for a post, comments allow for more meaningful interaction and the exchange of ideas and opinions.
Tracking comments on social media can provide valuable, qualitative insights into how a particular piece of content is being received and what people think or feel about it. This information can be used to improve future content and better understand the interests and preferences of a target audience.
Tracking comments can also help to identify potential customer or user feedback, complaints, and support issues. You can use this to inform the development of your products or services.
Lastly, comments serve as a source of user-generated content, which is hugely powerful. You can use this content in your social media strategy, driving reputability for your brand.
5. Shares & Reposts
The more a post is shared, the more people will see it. That means your content is reaching a wider audience allowing you to grow your online following and increase brand recognition.
Shares and reposts indicate that people want their followers to see your piece of content. It’s new-age word-of-mouth marketing in action. People are much more likely to engage with something (or build an opinion on something) if they see their friends like it too. It’s a new level of personal endorsement that’s immensely valuable for your business.
If you’re running an employee advocacy program, you can use tools like Clearview Social Media Analytics to view important metrics like comments, likes, and shares. These content stats allow you to gauge your earned media value as well as monitor the type of content that resonates most with employees and their networks.
6. Saves
When someone saves your piece of content, it indicates relevance, value, and intent. It means your content is so engaging and exciting your audience thinks it’s worth keeping for later. The more saves you have, the better! It really means you’re getting something right.
If you’re struggling to consistently deliver valuable content pieces, it’s worth investing in a tool. Clearview Social offers a discover content feature giving you access to top blogs or competitor pieces you’d like to monitor. You can stay relevant thanks by tapping into Google alerts, industry news, and native sharing.
7. Brand Mentions
Tracking brand mentions is essential for reputational management and customer feedback. It’s also one of the best ways to track influencer marketing and analyze competitor content. In essence, monitoring brand mentions allows you to stay on top of your online presence.
You can use social media monitoring tools that help you, giving you real-time access to multiple platforms. Most tools allow you to search keywords, hashtags, and mentions for your brand or products. Spend some time doing a deep dive into your brand mentions and understanding the general sentiment (like you would with consumer comments). It’ll give you a good idea of your brand’s perception.
8. Number of followers
The number of followers you have on social media is an important metric for measuring the reachability of your social media channels. However, it’s also essential to evaluate your follower base beyond just the number of followers. For example, it’s a good idea to track how many of your followers are from your target market and how many of them are engaging with your content.
You should also evaluate the quality and type of your followers—are they similar to your ideal customer profile? Do they have interests in common? Are they engaged? These are all crucial factors to consider when evaluating the quality of your following.
9. Audience demographics
While this isn’t a direct engagement metric, audience insights help you better understand who you’re attracting with each post. Understanding the demographic makeup of your audience allows you to create targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with specific age groups, genders, locations, and other demographic segments.
If your audience insights don’t match your target audience, you may need to reconsider who your product is actually for. Or, you may need to rework your content strategy to better suit your ideal audience so they’re more likely to engage with your products or posts.
10. Engagement rate
Engagement Rate refers to the percentage of your followers who engage with your brand’s social media posts. According to Twitter, the overall average engagement rate for a brand account is 0.037%.
That being said, achieving a high engagement rate is complex. It requires careful planning and a thoughtful content strategy. You’ll need to prioritize quality over quantity to get the best possible results. Look for ways to engage your audience in more meaningful and authentic ways. You should also take the time to create compelling content that helps to establish your brand as an authority in your industry.
To calculate the engagement rate for a post, you need to add up the total number of meaningful engagements (likes, comments, shares, etc.) and divide that by the impressions or reach. Let’s quickly define these terms:
- Impressions are the number of times a post appears on a user’s timeline
- Reach refers to the potential number of viewers of a post
If you want to know if your content was enjoyable or valuable, the engagement rate indicates if your post was a success with your audience or if they passed it over for more appealing content.
Every social media platform measures engagement a little bit differently, and it’s important to remember this when evaluating your engagement rate. Twitter focuses on comments, likes, and Retweets, while LinkedIn and Facebook use comments, shares, click-throughs, saves, and reactions.
11. Click-Through Rate
A particularly important engagement metric for both LinkedIn and Facebook is the click-through rate. It shows how many people are looking at a post versus clicking on it.
To measure a post’s click-through rate, you divide the number of clicks on a link or post by the number of impressions.
While this is a helpful metric, it can be easy to get gimmicky with your content if you only focus on click-through rates. You don’t want to write something “salesy” just to get someone to click, because then you’ll suffer a high bounce rate.
Hot Tip: You can use tools like Clearview Social to track your clicks accurately, book a demo today.
12. Bounce Rate
The nemesis of the click-through rate is the bounce rate. You have to look at these metrics hand in hand. A bounce rate measures the number of people who visit your social page but leave almost as soon as they get there. So maybe your funny tweet caught their eye, but after they saw your full Twitter page, they weren’t interested in your company.
To calculate your bounce rate, you divide the total number of single-page sessions on your social page by the total number of page sessions.
When someone discovers one of your social media posts, you want them to explore your page further and even click on your website to learn more about your brand. If your bounce rate is high and people aren’t staying on your page or navigating to your site, you might need to look at reworking your landing page or tweaking your content. Perhaps you aren’t attracting your target audience with your posts.
One easy way to improve bounce rate is to include visual elements in your social media strategy. This helps engage visitors and makes them more likely to watch your other content.
13. Customer Response Rate
If you want to ensure you’re interacting enough with potential customers, you must keep a close eye on your customer response rate.
To figure out your customer response rate, you take the number of responses you give to social media users and divide that by the number of people who have engaged with your company.
Your customer response rate needs to be high to encourage further engagement with your company. Responding to customers on social media makes your audience feel heard and solidifies their relationship with your brand, making them more likely to recommend you to their friends and family.
Content is king and engagement is queen
Your social media content strategy is fundamental to your success online. Yes, content is king. You need to ensure you’re delivering enough content to your audience to drive relevance. But there’s nothing worse than content for content’s sake. In fact, it’s likely to do more harm than good.
By tracking critical social media engagement metrics, you can ensure that the content you deliver is relevant and enticing for consumers. You’ll be able to analyze everything from sentiment to purchase intent giving you a much deeper understanding of performance.
Maximize your metrics with Clearview Social
When you want to maximize your brand’s engagement on social media, one of the best methods is employee advocacy. With Clearview Social’s easy-to-use employee advocacy software, your employees can share pre-approved social content straight from their email to their personal social pages with one click.
Clearview Social breaks down data for you with our robust analytics. You don’t have to worry about trying to calculate engagement rates on your own because Clearview Social provides easy-to-understand analytics that shows what type of content works best for you.
If you need to increase your invisibility online, get a free demo with Clearview Social so we can take your social media engagement to the next level.