5 Social Media Stats Your Business Should Track
Different social media campaigns have different objectives, and different objectives will lead to different social media stats you’ll want to track.
Some social media campaign objectives might include:
- Driving traffic to your website
- Spreading brand awareness
- Building social proof
- Lead generation
- New product launch
Whatever the objective, you’ll want to track your stats to make sure your social media marketing is on the right track. Tracking too many stats can be overly time-consuming and redundant, so we recommend focusing on 2-3 key stats in each campaign.
1. Number of followers
Many traditional businesses (and their respective in-charge) see this statistic as the most important one. It’s not hard to see why, since it’s the most easily visible metric to a potential customer when he/she lands on your social media profile.
It’s instant social proof.
But the number of followers only form part of the picture. Any business can easily increase their follower count by buying followers, but that only hurts the business in the long run.
You’ll also want to track how engaged your followers are with your brand. Track this stat together with rate of follower growth (number of followers over time) and you can get a good idea of how good your campaign is at attracting new followers.
2. Reach
Reach is essentially the number of people who have seen your post or profile. For every post that comes up, not all your followers will be able to view the post. Facebook, for example, has notoriously low organic reach for its posts.
Tracking reach allows you to determine how many people your content has reached out to, which is an essential metric for brand awareness campaigns. Besides creating good content, paid ads help you extend your post reach considerably.
3. Engagement
In a nutshell, engagement is a measure of how much your audience is interacting with your post or profile. A like, share, comment or click can count as an interaction.
A profile with high engagement is more involved with is audiences, which usually means that either your audience loves your content, or they’re trying to address grievances. Engagement alone does not tell you how attractive your post is to your audiences. A profile with a high number of posts per week might get more engagement for the profile, but lower engagement per post.
A related stat which is useful to look at would be engagement rate, which measures the post engagement per person reached.
4. Conversions
A conversion is an action taken when a visitor to your website completes a desired goal, such as filling out a form or making a purchase. Depending on the objective of your social media campaign, you would want to track different conversions.
It is also useful to track the different actions taken by visitors on your website. For example, if you have a high number of visitors putting items into the shopping cart on your ecommerce site, but a low number of visitors actually completing the purchase, this might signify a bottleneck at the payment options. Perhaps you’ll need to expand your payment providers, reduce shipping costs, or check that your payment options are functioning in order to increase the number of visitors completing the purchase.
5. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and Return on Investment (ROI)
Without sales, your business wouldn’t exist. So it’s not far to say most business owners are concerned about the bottom line.
That’s where ROAS and ROI measurements come in. ROAS measures the amount of revenue generated over money spent for ads, especially for businesses with ecommerce. ROI measures the amount of revenue generated over cost of running the entire campaign.
ROAS and ROI tracking are great for sales focused campaigns, but not so much for other campaign objectives which would lead to more intangible results.
Looking to learn Social Media strategies to get those stats working for you? Here's an article on Social Media strategies for small businesses that might just help point you in the right direction!