How to correctly measure the business’ social media engagement performance?

Social media is an essential and effective marketing strategy to promote businesses, products and services. However, measuring the performance without the proper approach can be ineffective and negatively impact or disadvantage the business’s success.

Social media metrics that matter

The growth and engagement metric: instead of focusing the quantitative data like “how many customers”, directly focusing on qualitative data and details about the customer’s engagement can matter more. Social media engagement metrics can indicate the number of people interacting and consuming the content.

Content strategy metric: identifies if the marketing strategies and approaches are working. Monitoring aspects of reach, impressions and audience growth rate can inform and help many business areas. Understanding the average number of people reached through posts, stories, and videos, further discovering the number of times the content has been seen and finally calculating the new followers; all this information can demonstrate compelling and proper measuring of the social media performance.

Audience quality metric: similar to the engagement rate acknowledging the number of people reacting, commenting or sharing the content can calculate for the business the amount of returning, existing and new followers; moreover, uncover which strategy was the most effective by tracking the most shared, popular, re-post or retweets.

Measuring metrics incorrectly

On the other hand, some metrics can be mismeasured, consequently calculating useless information on the business’s social media performance. An example can be a customer with multiple devices like a mobile phone, tablet and computer, which can confuse and disrupt customer profiling. Moreover, it can be problematic for the clickstream analysis because the consumer’s research on one device is different.

Facebook performance example

An example of Facebook’s performance is an excellent demonstration of the importance of measuring. Facebook’s native analytics can be found in the Insights tab. Despite that, the engagement metrics can be tracked by notifying Facebook of how the customer’s interaction is on the content.

Consumers of Facebook can like a page or post with access to tracking the activity. Facebook approaches to posts reach the number of unique people who have witnessed the page of content, and engagement with the number of people clicking, liking, commenting or even sharing the content can be the most valuable information for the organisation. Nevertheless, according to a survey, the average engagement rate is 2-3%.