The goal for any successful company is to drive revenue and social media is the prime vehicle to get there. The only obstacle that stands in the way is knowledge. There are many SMBs that simply don’t have a grasp on the meaning of social analytics and how the data can break barriers when it comes to revenue.
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Modern times call for modern measures and the best way to communicate with people is through the apps they download. That means social media and your digital arena. A lot of insight can be gained simply by studying the behavior of your audience. The following are some of the top statistics you should pay attention to and how they can guide your business decisions.
Audience Growth
Having “followers” may have once seemed like a useless goal, but now it can determine the total popularity of a brand. By calculating your percentage of followers over time, you come up with a metric called your “audience growth rate.” This will depict your social media momentum. You want a steady growth rate at all times and if anything happens to change, you should be tweaking your content strategy.
You can directly connect your social data to revenue through your audience growth rate. The more people you present to, the better the chances of making a sale. Through examining the metric, you can see where and how your marketing efforts are paying off over time. Which events or content types match up with the highest rate? Use that to plan your strategy accordingly.
Engagement Rate
Once you’ve determined who your audience is, it’s time to examine their level of engagement. To understand that you’re speaking to the right people (and listening to those who might be) the engagement rate should guide your marketing decisions. It allows you to check the pulse of your existing strategies and establish whether your social media marketing efforts are working. Likes, shares, and favorites are great, but studying the engagement rate will tell you who the influencers are in your audience.
Creative Visions
Much like your audience growth rate, your engagement rate is a metric that can guide your efforts and help increase your ROI. If you’re posting the wrong message or talking to the wrong people, your engagement rate will be low. That means you may need to change your approach. Tweak your messages until you have a consistent engagement rate and a steady growth.
Lead Acquisition
Tracking the frequency with which people visit your site allows you to better target audiences. Your visitor frequency rate generally gives you insight into lead acquisition. It allows you to parse visitors into two bins: new and return. The return visitors can further indicate the depth at which you engage and the content you post.
You can track the percentage of referrals you get from social media and then determine how often they come to see you. The more people return, the higher the engagement rate. The newer visitors will help you to better understand your brand reach and audience metrics that depict meaningful growth.
Conversion
Once you have a robust audience with a high engagement rate, you might want to consider tracking the conversions. This will help determine if your social media marketing efforts are on point. Beyond simply attracting people to your site, you should define the goals of how you want to convert visitors into consumers. One way to NOT get the job done is with super salesy jargon or excessively pushing your service/product on an audience.
Convert
There are two types of conversions you can track: direct clicks and assisted social conversions. Defining specific conversion goals built around social will help you to understand which social site is sending your best traffic. Direct clicks will only demonstrate the success of a campaign.
Social conversion isn’t about making a sale so much as it is getting people acquainted with your brand. When that happens, they will then feel comfortable enough to make a purchase. It’s a much more organic means of creating customers.
Key Performance Indicators
Otherwise referred to as a “KPI,” a key performance indicator is used to set a specific goal and is vital to reporting on investments in social media.
Business Bullet
KPIs track precise metrics and set standards for strategic marketing. When it comes to social strategy, performance can be measured by a variety of factors including:
- Email opt-ins
- Purchases
- Requests for a demo
- Shares
- Downloads
- Page visits and duration
- Social media channel
Key performance indicators help a business stay on track and meet set goals in an efficient manner. Gaining social insight is as much about watching, as it is doing. In order to understand your audience, you must watch the numbers closely.
Viral Content
The content that delivers the most high-value visitors should also be duly noted. Understanding the posts that are most relevant to those converting will help steer marketing efforts in a successful direction. It’s always important to know what your most viral content is and why.
Future content can then be deployed depending on the types of things already being liked and shared. Paying attention to which content was shared, and how and where it was done so, is the first step to gaining social insight through viral material. Identifying the conversions that result from social referrals will help a business continue to produce content that goes viral.
Core Metrics
In addition to social data that reads between the lines, there are some standard metrics that will always give you insight no matter what marketing strategy is employed. The following are the core metrics you should always be watching for across all social channels:
Bounce Rate
Don’t assign this metric great importance when it comes to mining social data. Your referrals from social media will have the shortest attention spans of all, so expect a high bounce rate. Even if your content is the most enriching on the market, people may still take a few times to stick with your message.
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However, this metric shouldn’t be ignored either. If your bounce rate is extremely high and no one seems to be hanging around, you may have a problem with your content. Is it too long? Are you stuffing it with SEO? Take the time to study your front page and make a few adjustments. Keep tweaking until you see a decrease in your bounce rate.
Reach
Every social media site is different with how they calculate reach, but it basically comes down to the number of people you touch (reach) with your content. The true tell of reach is audience growth and engagement. It’s one thing for people to scroll past your content on their feed, it’s another thing to like and comment. Real reach is about inspiring people to take action with your material and engage.
Click-Through Rate
A click-through rate (CTR) will help you gauge the success of your social media efforts. The more engaged your audience is, the more they will “click-through” your content (with the ultimate goal being conversion). This metric is important because it’s also tied to paid advertising. Pay-per-click (PPC) is a form of internet advertising that uses the CTR metric to make you money.
Ten Golden Rules
Broken down, the CTR is the total number of users who view your site, page, or ad (impressions) divided by the number of times it was clicked. A high CTR is typically indicative of a successful social media marketing campaign. People are engaged and moving through your content. They are clicking a path to purchase.
Influence
This metric is important because it measures your social media relevancy. The greater the influence your brand has, the more influencers/brand advocates you are likely to convert. This opens up an entirely new arena of marketing that is free word of mouth. The more influencers, the greater the competitive edge.
Ultimately, there is no right or wrong combination of metrics that you should be collecting. Every industry is different and every business, within each market segment, also differs. Understanding operations and your business needs is the first step in establishing a set of standards that will give you greater awareness.
Social insight is about being diligent with numbers and the ability to read between the lines. When done right, collecting social data can be a very powerful marketing tool. At the end of the day, it’s all about the customer. The more you understand who is paying attention to your brand, the bigger the reward—for all parties involved.