7 Social Media Engagement Metrics to Track If You Want to Grow Your Numbers

By now, you know that building an engaged community around your small business is key to promoting your products or services successfully. You know that social media is the right place to get a big following of the right people. You also know that it’s the best way to build and maintain relationships with your target audience.

But how do you make it happen.

Or, more precisely, how do you know it is happening?

That’s by no means an easy question. In fact, if you Google “how to measure social media engagement”, you will get more than 50 million results. After reviewing the first results, you’ll come to the conclusion that different people have different ideas of what metrics are important and what not.

You know that social media works. There are so many examples of brands that have built their businesses with the help of social media – think Humans of New York, Buzzfeed or UpWorthy. Measuring your efforts is the best way to tell if you are on the right track. But where do you start?

Here are seven key social media engagement metrics every small business owner should follow.

1. Audience Growth Rate

It goes without saying that 500 loyal customers have more value than 5,000 people who are just looking around. But, if 5,000 fans are really engaged with your brand then 5,001 fans would be more valuable, correct?

You’re probably trying to increase your fan base, but how can you say for sure that your strategy is working? Well, this is a simple one – just check the number of followers or fans you have on every platform. Of course, you should use a tool that keeps track of the growing numbers to be able to tell accurately how this data is changing over time. Or, you can do it the old fashioned way, by recording these numbers down at the end of every month and comparing the results.

2. New Followers Rate

Let’s say your social media fan base is growing nicely and steady. But, how many followers are you actually gaining per social network or week? It would be helpful to have an accurate idea of how your online presence is growing. There are several tools you can use to track both new and lost followers, such as SocialBro for Twitter or Followers/Unfollowers for Instagram.

3. Likes per Posts

Knowing if your posts are relevant to your audience or if they find your content helpful or entertaining is key to running a successful social media strategy. By tracking this metric you can ensure that you are always creating content that your audience loves to see in their news feeds.

A great tool you can use to track the number of likes per post is Buffer. The software keeps track of your favorite posts and lets you know by how much your likes per posts have increased or decreased.

4. Shares per Posts

Similar to likes per posts, you probably want to know how many times the average post is shared, repined or retweeted.

While tracking likes per posts gives you a good idea of what type of content your audience enjoys, analyzing the number of shares tells you how you can establish a deeper, emotional connection with your followers. If someone shares your post (and hopefully they don’t do it because you screwed something up), it means that your message got to their hearts. And, you probably know already that emotions inspire your customers to buy from you, engage with you, or advocate for your small business without you having to bribe them.

Because emotions are such a powerful motivator, you need to be able to tell what type of posts makes your audience tick. Again, there are several tools you can use to measure average shares per posts.

5. Comments per post

Besides watching how many likes and shares your posts get, it’s important to track how many conversations your content is generating between you and your social media followers – and between your followers themselves.

Comments are the backbone of social media engagement. They give your social media presence a sense of community, which can make your brand look more appealing to those who are interacting with you for the first time. Imagine you just arrived at a party where you don’t know anyone except the host. You look around, trying to mingle, but everyone is in dead silence. Most likely, you are not going to be the one starting the conversation. The same goes for your social media engagement. If no one is commenting on your posts, newcomers are less likely to interact with your brand.

6. Clicks per Post

One of the main reasons you are trying to build a social media following – besides building and nurturing a loyal community – is to drive traffic to your website and ultimately sales. That is why it’s important to track and measure the number of times people have clicked the links you included in your posts.

By measuring clicks per posts, you can see if your social media content is aligned with your website content. It’s important that your posts get a lot of likes and shares, but ultimately you want to drive some of your followers to your non-social properties, such as your website, a landing page, or your e-com store.

7. Reach by Region

This metric is especially important for local businesses. By measuring reach by region, you can see the number of people who saw your social media content, broken down by city, region, and country. If you run a local business, it’s important to know if your posts are getting to the right audience segment or if you need to change your strategy. Just imagine targeting consumers from California and finding out that most of your followers come from Texas.

There are numerous other social media engagement metrics that you can measure. The most important thing to remember is that you are better off tracking a few important ones than everything under the radar.

Once you start tracking the results of your social media strategy, make sure to adjusted when required and don’t be afraid to experiment.