Four social media metrics that should matter to your brand

Business Buzz
By Candice Sealey

Your brand’s social media pages have hundreds of followers and “likes”. Each time you post, people mention how great your product/service is! You think “great, I am making progress!”.

However, you notice that your sales haven’t increased much. Why is that? The question you should ask yourself now is what tangible value did these metrics add to your business/brand.

Your social media analytics provide insight into what your fans, followers and customers are expecting from your business. Information you can learn includes: their likes and dislikes, the percentage of traffic that converts into your desired goal e.g. sales, and how many followers actually turn into website traffic, for example.

Let’s get deeper into four meaningful metrics that matter:

1. Fan base – Growing your fans base is different than growing your followers. Your fans are people that promote your content or your business on their social media platforms – they are your most loyal followers. You can calculate your fan base by measuring how many people tag or mention your brand or even share your content on social media.
Followers have some interest in your brand but your fans are very interested. Fans are likely to watch your video from start to finish and read a full blog post, for example, before they “share” it.

2. Social reach – As the name implies, this measures how many users your posts reach.
Whilst reach is not the only metric that matters, it does give you an idea as to how well your accounts and content attract new audience members. How do you measure it? E.g. evaluate the reach of individual posts. How many people saw a post? With that information, you can learn which post resonates or converts better, which in turn can inform what you post in the future.

3. Referral Traffic – How well does your social media content lead people to your website? (if you have one). Of course, Google Analytics is a good resource for tracking referrals. Creating more engaging calls to action in your social media gives customers a reason to click. Hence that’s one of several ways to increase referral traffic.

4. Bounce rate – If visitors visit your home page but don’t go further on your website, that speaks volumes. It’s important to check your bounce rate metrics. If the bounce rate is high from social media traffic, visitors are clearly interested in the post since they clicked on the link, but the content on the site didn’t deliver what was expected so the user exited. Again, Google Analytics can give you that information.
Ideally your bounce rate should be low. You can also have more relevant content on your landing page to encourage visitors to navigate to other pages on your site.

• Candice Sealey is the Founder & Principal Consultant at Ignite! a Full-service Marketing & PR Consultancy that helps businesses/brands to stand out and communicate the right message to the right people at the right time through Strategy, Marketing, Media services and Design solutions. She is also a freelance content writer, advertising copywriter, voice over talent,media personality. Follow us on FB & IG @igniteresults Phone:784-432-2223. Email: igniteresults@gmail.com