How To Measure Your Social Media Performance

If you want to ensure you are offering value to your audience on social media, it's important to measure your social media performance. You can do this by analysing data from your social media platform and finding meaning. The more data you have, the more accurate your findings will be. I'll teach you where to find this data, how to read it and what it could potentially mean. 

Terminology 

Understanding terminology seen throughout an analytics dashboard will help you measure your social media performance. 

Reach: The total number of people that have seen your content.

 Organic Reach: The number of people who have seen your content without paying for further reach.

 Paid Reach: You've paid for your content to be placed in front of these people. 

Impressions: The number of times your content has been shown on social media or a search result page. 

Mentions: The number of times someone has mentioned your account/business on the social media platform. 

Goals & KPI's 

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty, let's talk about your business goals and why they're essential for shaping your KPI's. 

Common Marketing Goals Are:

• Build brand awareness.
• Generate leads and acquire customers. 
• Engage with your audience, build a relationship and provide value to them. 

Think of your marketing goals. You can choose more than one!

Brand Awareness

If you aim to build brand awareness, you will look more at how many impressions you have on your social media posts and how many profile visits you've had.  

Generate Leads and Acquire Customers

If you want to generate leads and acquire new customers, you will look at how many people entered your sales funnel. You'll want to understand if you are attracting the right people and look at your strategies' effectiveness in converting them into potential customers. 

Want to learn more about your sales funnel? Click here.

Build Engagement, Relationships and Value

If your purpose is to engage with your customers via social media, you will look at how long your audience has watched your videos and how many likes, shares, comments, and saves you have on your content. Engagement is an indication that your audience sees value in your content. Your audience will share your content or tag their network when they think others will too.

Understand Your Audience 

It's all very well to assume who your audience is, but sometimes the analytics from your social media account can tell you otherwise. Your data can suggest that your account is more popular with a different age group, etc. If this is true, you may need to adjust what content you offer or develop a strategy to attract your desired audience. Furthermore, ask yourself which social platform your desired audience hangs out on. 

Where To Find Your Analytics Dashboard

If you're thinking, "where on earth do I find the analytics?" let me show you.  

Instagram 

Head to your Instagram profile. If you have a business or creator profile, you should have access to "Insights". Insights is another way of saying analytics. 

Facebook 

Go to your business page on Facebook and click "Manage Page". From here, click on "Insights". 

LinkedIn 

In your web browser or your phone, direct yourself to your business's page or personal page. Your analytics dashboard should be visible to you on your page. 

TikTok

Go to your profile. Click on the top right-hand corner, where there will be three lines. You will then head to settings and privacy. Click on "Creator tools" and then "Analytics". 

Twitter

Sign in to your Twitter account. Go to the home page. Next, click on "More". In the menu, click "Analytics". 

YouTube

Click your profile picture on the top-right hand side of the screen. Click "YouTube Studio". Click on "Analytics".

Take the time to navigate your analytics dashboard. Most dashboards will show you more about your audience. For example, what country they are from, their gender, what time your audience is most active and their age range. Most will also show you your top-performing posts based on either reach or engagement. 

How Do We Measure Social Media Performance At Best Practice?

The Best Practice Marketing team holds a weekly marketing metrics review. We look at each social media platform, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The team looks at our audience, the number of followers we have gained or lost, the high-performing and underperforming posts, and discuss what's trending. 

We question why the underperforming posts didn't go well. Was it because of the time of day it was posted? Is it because the topic or content is not valuable to our audience? Is the content's message unclear? Were the graphics not enticing? Is it an algorithm change?  

If a post is performing, we again analyse why. Next, we take what is doing well and apply it to our other posts—for example, adding a call to action, the style of the graphic and exploring the same topic further. 

The team shares research from other social media accounts of interest or those in the same industry, and we discuss what ideas we could experiment with and trial.  

In summary, understanding your social media performance will offer you feedback from your audience. Engage with your audience and find out what interests them and what they want to learn- you can do this by creating polls and stories. By providing valuable content, you're strengthening the relationship with your audience and boosting your credibility. Social media today has created many opportunities for us to reach further, faster, and connect with like-minded individuals. 

If you want to learn more about how you can boost your content on Social Media, check out our article, "A Guide To Boost Your Social Media Content".

Thanks again for your time, and I'll see you in the next piece.

Kobi Simmat - Director & CEO of the Best Practice Group.