Social Media seems like fun but not all that fun when your manager tells you to show the numbers.

Numbers matter but not all numbers matter. We’re talking about social media metrics that matter. Social Media is a brilliant marketing tactic to get an insight on customer demographics, emotional reactions in real time and much more. If you focus on the right data points, however, you can increase the brand’s ROI from all the social media efforts that either you or your social media marketer is making.

Let’s face it. The purpose of any social media initiative is to increase traffic to your website, leads and expand your brand presence.

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If you’ve landed yourself with the wrong social media marketer, they will most likely waste a lot of your time in vanity metrics. It is seldom that social media marketers will point you towards the holistic picture that uncovers the whether your social media is reaping the desired results and meeting the business objective that you set out to meet in the first place.

Like everything, there’s a why and how. We’re trying to cover why do you need social media metrics for your social media efforts in this blog. Of course, we will cover a host of tool that can help you uncover the potential of social media but that in another blog.

There are 4 broad categories of social media metrics that are extremely important for your brand.

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The above metrics categories can either be quantitative or qualitative. For example, if you’re tracking the number of social media posts, followers increase, views, leads and sales – you’re talking about quantitative metrics. On the other hand, qualitative metrics will require you to monitor comments, sentiments of customers, success stories and learnings.

Both are essential but most social media marketers will present the quantitative metrics to you packaged as fancy reports and superficial graphs.

Metrics are an essential element of your social media strategy (a social media strategy is a strategic plan of how a company will incorporate social media into its business. It must be guided by goals that directly contribute to the larger business objectives).

There are some metrics that are more important than the other depending on the social media channel that you might be prioritizing. The premise of social media KPIs is reach (people who’re familiar about your brand), engagement (how often is it that you engage with targeted audiences) and conversions (how many followers are converting into your customers).

Some of the social media metrics that you must start tracking immediately, to get a complete picture, are listed below:

• Volumes that your posts attract – Each time you have a social media post, it can do 2 things. Either improve or reduce your relationship with your followers. You might have a better response on a social media platform compared to the others.
• Stories Consumption– You need an understanding of how people are consuming your stories.
• Relevance Score– There are paid advertising efforts that have a relevancy score (and it depends on the performance of your ad, positive interactions and (not to forget) negative interactions.
• Video consumption– If you’re doing videos on social media, there must be some returns. The total and average minutes that the videos are viewed are critical as these are becoming relevant and critical for social media success.
• Be responsive – For once we don’t mean the mobile responsiveness. If you have followers who are posting comments or reviews, ensure that you are tracking your responsiveness.
• Conversion rate – At the end of the day, you need ROI to your social media efforts. People landing on your website and landing page from your social media channels is one of the most critical and essential to track.

The social media dream will not come true and turn into conversions and profits till you do your social media metrics right. You might need the help of social media marketer to make things fall into place. We’ll be happy to help.