Considering content marketing for your business in 2024? It's a strategic move but one that demands meticulous planning and dedicated resources. Just like any other investment on socials, you need assurance that your efforts yield a fruitful return. And that comes from tracking social media metrics, which you can easily do with the help of advanced social media performance monitoring tools.
Yes, these metrics, both quantitative and qualitative, serve as the barometer of your strategy's impact. From organic search traffic to social shares, they provide invaluable insights into what works, what needs adjustment, and what might require a complete overhaul. Luckily for you, we have compiled 5 categories of the most essential content performance metrics you need to understand and track in 2024 to stay ahead in your niche.
Social Media Metrics To Track In 2024
Social media metrics serve as vital indicators of your online performance, offering insights into how well your strategy resonates with your audience and where improvements can be made. They act as scorecards, detailing the reach, engagement, and impact of your content.
While your specific goals dictate which metrics are most relevant, understanding industry trends can inform your focus. Let's explore these metrics in depth to help refine your strategy and drive business growth. Here are 5 categories of essential social media metrics along with their formulas; every business should track and achieve marketing goals with confidence.
Social Media Engagement Metrics
If your goal is assessing the effectiveness of your online presence, then it's pivotal to track certain metrics that offer a comprehensive view of your social media performance. Understanding and analyzing these metrics is a great way to see if the content you’re creating is resonating, no matter which social media platforms you use. Here are some of the crucial social media metrics that need your attention for a successful social media strategy.
1. Follower/Subscriber Growth
Tracking follower/subscriber growth will help you gauge the effectiveness of your content strategy. A growing social media follower base indicates increased brand visibility and potential for engagement and vice-versa.
2. Likes, Shares, And Comments
Likes, shares, and comments serve as fundamental indicators of audience engagement on social media platforms. Each like signifies approval, while shares extend content visibility, and comments reflect deeper audience involvement. Tracking these metrics will help you gain insights into your content’s effectiveness and understand what resonates with the audience.
3. Post Reach/Impressions
This metric is particularly helpful in evaluating the visibility and exposure of your content to potential audiences. Understanding the reach of your posts lets you optimize content distribution strategies, maximize brand exposure, and enhance overall content performance.
4. Social Shares
Track this metric, and you’ll know about the virality and appeal of your content among your audience in socials. You get insights into content amplification and audience advocacy, identify popular content, and optimize future content strategy for greater reach and engagement.
5. Video Views
If you want to evaluate the performance of your video content, be it for any social platform, monitor the video views regularly to gauge viewer engagement and interest. You can further optimize what's working and what isn't for your video content to reach your desired engagement.
6. Brand Awareness
Measuring brand awareness involves monitoring brand mentions, along with sentiment analysis. Tracking this metric helps you assess the impact of your social media content, gauge its audience perception, and guide for better brand-building efforts and online reputation management strategies.
Organic Search Traffic Metrics
Organic search traffic refers to visitors who land on your website through unpaid search engine results. If your goal is to assess the effectiveness of your content in driving website traffic and improving search engine visibility, then monitoring this metric is crucial. Within organic search traffic, there are 3 more metrics that give you a better idea of your performance.
1. Page Views
If someone is landing on your website page through your Instagram link in bio, you can track your page views through GA4 to view the number of times your landing page has been viewed.
2. Users
If you track your users or unique visitors, you will know how many people visit your socials. However, if the same person does multiple visits, it is only counted as one. Further, you can work on analyzing the user behavior.
3. Brand Mentions
If your goal is to look for references to your brand/product/service on the internet, then this is the metric you must track. By monitoring brand mentions on social media, you can see what people are saying about your business and where and assess the level of your brand’s awareness. This way, you know the positive or negative sentiment or perception of your brand among users.
4. Average Engagement Rate On Page
The average engagement rate for websites is 66%, 63% for B2B websites, and 71% for B2C websites. So, if you want to know yours, you need to track this particular metric to understand whether your visitors are simply skimming through the content or dedicating a good time to reading it. Having a good average engagement time is a strong indicator of your content success, while a lower time emphasizes the need for a revamp.
Retention Metrics
Retention metrics tell you how well your social media site or sites are retaining visitors. Be it Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn, while gauging the content performance of any particular platform or all of them, you must track 3 definite retention metrics that will let you know whether your content is able to retain or not, as retention and acquisition goes hand in hand.
1. Return Rate
Did you know that the average return rate for E-commerce is typically 20% to 30%? Hence, the return rate is the metric you should track to gain insights on how many new vs. how many return visitors you’re getting. While you must have a different approach for both groups, it is important to have a healthy mix. The higher the rate of returning visitors, the more chances there are for your content to provide value to your visitors. You can further identify factors contributing to user retention and accordingly act to enhance customer loyalty and lifetime value.
2. Click-Through Rate
Are people simply visiting your content on social media? Or are they performing the desired action you want them to? To know this, you need to track your CTR or click-through rate; otherwise, you won’t be able to fully understand whether or not your content is effective. Tracking CTRs will let you know how many people express more interest in your business, which will further indicate lead generation.
3. Bounce Rate
If your goal is to make people stay and take the time to explore and digest some of your content and then consequently buy, then the bounce rate is the metric you should track. The average bounce rate is between 26% and 70%, but a bounce rate higher than 70% is a cause for concern. The higher it is, the more people have navigated away from your website, while a lower bounce rate shows that they have taken a liking to your content. This will help you identify the content with a higher bounce rate to repurpose or update it accordingly.
4. Audience Growth Rate
If you want to know how much your audience has increased in comparison to the entire audience at the moment in social media, then it is the metric to track. It will let you assess the ability of your content strategy to expand your reach and impact on social media, as well as reflect how much your audience has grown relative to your existing ones.
5. Amplification Rate
Monitoring the amplification rate is essential for understanding how effectively your audience shares your content with their networks. It quantifies the extent to which your content is being shared beyond your immediate followers, indicating its virality and reach. The higher the rate, the more it will lead to organic sharing and extended reach.
Conversion Metrics
What counts as a good conversion rate varies depending on your industry and what marketing channel you’re using. But as a rule of thumb, anything between 2% and 5% is pretty solid.
Thus, every piece of content that you put on social media is with the intention of making the visitor interact with your content and brand and consequently take the action that has been designed for them. If, after investing considerable capital and time, you want to analyze the outcomes of your efforts, here are the 2 important conversion metrics that definitely need tracking.
1. Percentage Of Conversion/Sales
The percentage of conversion or conversion rate is that stage when you track the percentage of people who completed a desired action over a specified time period. This refers to the goal completion stage, where your customers move from the awareness and consideration stage towards conversion. It's like signing up for an email newsletter, signing up for your business, or booking a demo.
2. Content Marketing ROI
If you want to analyze whether your efforts, time, and resources are paying off or not by investing in content marketing, this is your metric. Tracking this will help you gauge the percentage of the revenue you gained from content and the resources you invested in content production and distribution over a specific time period. Tracking this metric would further help you allocate resources effectively, justify budget allocations, and refine strategies to achieve business objectives more effectively.
3. Cost Per Click
Cost Per Click (CPC) is an essential metric in digital advertising that assesses the cost incurred for each click on an ad. It reflects the value of your ad in social media, attracting audience engagement. You must track CPC as it directly influences the cost-effectiveness of your marketing budget, ensuring optimal return on investment. By monitoring and optimizing CPC, you can allocate resources efficiently, maximize ad performance, and achieve their conversion goals effectively.
Social Media Customer Support Metrics
Did you know that good customer service makes 88% of customers more likely to purchase again? And that 42% of customers expect a response to their queries or issues within 30 minutes on social media. Yes, these stats prove the growing demand for swift and timely customer service, which makes tracking customer support metrics all the more important. Here are 2 you shouldn’t miss.
1. Average Reply Time
A good response time always equates to higher customer satisfaction and trust. And most consumers expect a brand to respond in the first 24 hours, and more than 39% of social media users expect businesses to reply within sixty minutes. Hence, if your concern is maintaining a positive brand reputation, then monitoring your brand's average reply time to customer inquiries and complaints on social media platforms is necessary. It reflects how promptly you address and resolve customer issues from your end. The faster the reply, the better.
2. Response Rate
Responding promptly to every customer message and comment demonstrates your brand's commitment to customer satisfaction. Tracking your response rate quantifies the percentage of messages you've addressed, reflecting your attentiveness to customer needs. This will help you keep track of what goes unanswered if you have missed any.
Track Your Content Performance With Statusbrew!
Now, all I have to ask is: Is your social media content meeting your performance benchmarks? If not, Statusbrew can help.
If your concern is to track all the social media metrics without having to monitor them manually, then you are in the right place. While we can all agree that native platforms analytics lets you do the same job in giving a performance overview, whether it's the individual platform or GA4 or Google Search Console, you won't get a detailed picture of each metric for different social platforms in a single dashboard.
Statusbrew, on the other hand, is not limited when it comes to tracking social metrics and gives you an overview of multiple networks at once, all within a single dashboard. Let’s see how.
You can:
- Select the multiple networks, profiles, users, post types, tags, plans, and state from the “Add Filter” option above and get a comprehensive overview of your post performance.
- Choose the desired date range that you want to target for the evaluation.
- Alter the post-appearance order as per your preference, either ascending or descending.
- Sort the whichever metrics you want to track the most.
- Organize the data into comprehensive analytics reports for your team or stakeholders to review further.
- Track audience sentiment around your brand or the content you post.
Sound convenient and doable, right? If you want to get to know more about our offerings, sign up for a FREE trial today and explore the platform before you commit!
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