What is the most important social media metrics to track? I am sure that you have asked yourself this question at least once in your life. There are so many of them right now so you can hardly track the right one. And it is not surprising at all, because every year we join more social networks, try to test them and see if they are worth spending time.
I have been there too. The first social media I joined was Facebook, of course. It was back in early 2008 when it was gaining its audience and becoming the most popular social media ever. At that time it was still not very popular in Europe.
In 2008 I never thought of social media as a marketing tool I can use in the future. Back then it was just a place to connect to my family and friends. Back then I did not think of it as a powerful weapon to influence thousand, millions of people. And in 2011 I created my first company page, of course, on Facebook, and then in other social media too.
In 2011 there were no such detailed marketing tools available in social media to track all kind of metrics as it is now. In 2011 I was just trying to get as many followers as possible. And I guess many of us did the same thing.
And as time passed I wanted to track everything I did in social media, in every social media. This is the time when I started to analyze information like followers, likes, shares, number of posts etc. This was quite fun to watch those numbers growing.
I know that this might sound strange but still, a lot of companies try to track the same social media metrics they used to track 5 years ago. Of course, if you have just one or two social accounts in your company and make a couple of posts per week, or even per month, then you can go on with that, no offense. But you can also try to use another approach to social media metrics.
And if your company is a multinational corporation with offices all over the world, do you think that will be possible to track all your marketing activity in social media? I guess not.
So what is the right social media metrics to track? That totally should be easy to track, easy to calculate, easy to understand and present to your colleagues and management. Fortunately, there is such a metric and it is called the engagement rate (ER).
Depending on your type of business you need to use one of the suggested formulas. If for example you run the marketing in a huge company with multiple social media accounts and you make over 5 posts per day, then it is obvious for you to use the ER Day formula.
You need to calculate all reactions this day (posts’ likes, shares, comments), divide it by the number of followers this day and multiply by 100%. The number you get is your social media engagement rate. And you have to do it for every social network separately or together – it is up to you to decide.
This is a great social media metrics to use. You can visualize it with diagrams and track your social media marketing effectiveness daily.
If your business does not require daily monitoring in social media, and you make posts from time to time, then you can use the ER Week formula. It has the same logic, and you need to calculate the weekly data instead of the daily one.
And if your business does not require weekly monitoring in social media, and you make posts once or twice per week, or even per month, then you can use the ER Month formula. It has the same logic as the previous formulas, and you need to calculate just the monthly data.
There are some other approaches to ER calculation, and they all have the right to be used as well. However, the above-described methods are the most correct and relevant. You can find more information by studying some of these books or you can also learn more about what marketing metrics to track in 7 Marketing Books to Read in 2019.
And always remember that everything you do should be fun, bring you joy and engage people!
