What are 3 Social Media Metrics Every Business Should Track?

Are you effective at targeting your customers with social media? Social media profiles are simple to set up, but they can be a challenge to manage. It’s difficult to keep your intended audience consistently interested and engaged in your content when popular platforms are saturated with similar posts from competitors. One way to ensure you’re making your mark on social media is by tracking key metrics. What are 3 social media metrics every business should track?

3 Social Media Metrics Every Business Should Track

Many companies use “likes” as their main way of judging the strength of their social media presence. While this is a good start, there are many other metrics businesses should be tracking to get a holistic understanding of their audience’s interaction with their brand. To get the most out of your profiles, make sure you’re monitoring the following on all relevant platforms. 

1. Stories show timely engagement with events
2. Comments offer detailed feedback on brands’ posts
3. Shares indicate which consumers endorse your brand

Keeping up with these metrics will give you a more nuanced perspective on audience engagement, which has the power to inform changes to your social media strategy. 

Stories Show Timely Engagement With Events

Users must interact with social media stories within one day of the writing social media posts. These metrics show which users are interested in following your brand’s day-to-day activities or special events. Snapchat popularized stories back in 2013, but they’ve become much more robust and widely used since.

Snapchat Story

Within Snapchat, users can view stories (customized photo and video content) that friends post. Now, users can also localize their content, attaching it to the Snap Map. Anyone browsing that region on the map can see that content publicly. According to NPR, the Snap Map is intended to bring the world closer together. When you’re a part of that global effort, you’re sparking trackable engagement worldwide.

Snapchat story is an area of opportunity for businesses to measure engagement with customers and it is an extremely popular interface with younger generations. The only catch is that stories unless personally saved, disappear from the platform after 24 hours. Even so, especially for timely event coverage, businesses can gauge engagement with a story based on its number of views since the time it was posted and the number of screenshots taken of the content.

Instagram Story Building

While Snapchat provides a decent read on viewer engagement, Instagram and Facebook now offer similar story-building functionalities. Businesses can analyze interactions on those platforms as well. Innovating on top of Snapchat’s creation, these stories allow users to include interactive elements like music and polls with ease. Businesses can track engagement through the number of users who engaged with the interactive elements.

While stories across platforms typically disappear after a day, Instagram created a Highlight feature that encourages users to archive their content and display it prominently on the top of their profiles. Story highlights allow businesses to benefit from the real-time appeal of stories without sacrificing the future availability of the content to promote themselves. They can continuously monitor these highlighted stories for updated engagement statistics.

Businesses should track how users interact with stories to understand what types of good content are popular (e.g. videos vs. pictures, quizzes, etc.). Since stories are becoming more popular over time, it’s important to get a good understanding of them now to ensure you’re ahead of the game later. Social media stories offer businesses the opportunity to highlight time-sensitive events and incorporate special effects in their content.

Comments Offer Detailed Feedback on Brands’ Posts

Comments present a great opportunity to get direct customer feedback. Comments are a feature on almost every leading social media platform including Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. They’re text-based reactions users can attach to any post. A user comments on a post if they’d like to verbalize a question or opinion about what was posted.

Tracking Comments

On social media, people are speaking theirs most candidly on brand and content. Because of the unique opportunity to collect qualitative feedback, businesses should track comments they’re receiving. Tracking comments will help you improve on interacting with users on social media effectively and efficiently.

Monitoring comments on social media makes it easier to provide timely responses to concerns, compliments, and questions. , This acts as a form of customer service, and it shows consumers you care about them. In the example above, the brand was able to offer advice and assistance quickly, solving the issue over comments. Tracking comments can be beneficial to both the brand and the consumers who rely on it. That is why it is important to track comments when building a brand identity on social media.

Actively Commenting

Actively commenting in a helpful and timely manner will leave consumers with a positive image of your brand. According to Hubspot research, the majority (71%) of people are more likely to invest in a brand after having a positive experience with it on social media. These benefits aren’t possible if your company isn’t monitoring the comments on its posts. In addition to the unique textual feedback, comments can offer, they’re particularly important because they allow for in-depth interactions between users and the brand.

Shares Indicate Which Consumers Endorse Your Brand 

A “share” occurs when a user chooses to display found content on their own profile for their network to view. Rarer than other forms of engagement, sharing social media content means a user has strong feelings about the content. Companies should track their “shares” on business profiles because shared posts on social media are strong endorsements of the message and it is an excellent way to attract customers online.

For businesses, this is particularly important to monitor. Ninety-five percent of people ages 18–34 follow brands through social media, but users won’t share content they don’t feel strongly about. People share posts to connect with a brand or individual and deliver quality content to their networks. The act of sharing attaches a user’s name to a brand’s content. This creates arguably the strongest visible connection between companies and individuals possible on social media.

It’s particularly useful to track your call to action posts. Doing so helps you monitor how successfully your content mobilized viewers. An increase in shares (or retweets on Twitter) is indicative of an increase in loyal followers who align themselves with your voice. Those sharing content trust your brand enough to spread your message to their entire social network. Measuring this engagement is essential to understanding how strongly your followers feel about your content.

Companies Should Start Monitoring a Diverse Set of Social Media Metrics

While likes and impressions are important, tracking several different forms of online interaction will give your brand a full understanding of your customer and your performance on social media. Using business analytics improves the customer experience. Stories, comments, and shares are three common features across many platforms, so they’re a great place to start optimizing how you monitor your engagement analytics.

Author Bio: Beryl Carington graduated from MIT. She had been working as a digital marketer in writemyessay for more than 5 years. Beryl is interested in films and enjoys traveling.