How do you make sure your social media marketing campaign is as good as it gets?
By focusing on the numbers, of course!
Social media marketers don’t simply share a piece of content and hope for the best. Thanks to a brilliant overview of their performance and a clear focus on getting the right metrics, they manage to consistently outperform competitors whose social media pages are somewhat slacking off.
Metrics allow you to see exactly what you are excelling at, as well as what you need to improve upon. Some pages can create great posts but still die in the content jungle simply because they didn’t focus on the metrics.
The data you can get out of your social media content allows you to develop highly specific and extremely measurable content for your audience that constantly evolves. On top of that, you can track the performance of every single piece you ever produce.
This allows for constant adjustments throughout your campaign so that by the end of it, you are left with something that simply works like a charm, every single time.
In this article, we will explain to you the most important metrics of a successful social media campaign – forget about the basics! Here, we are not looking for likes and shares, but for meaningful numbers guaranteed to drive some serious impact on your business.
The most important metrics in social media marketing
Reach
Reach is simply the number of people your content can get to.
So, if you shared a piece to your 100 followers but it reached 20 thousand people, you can say that your content has a great reach value.
Having this strong metric means that your social media platform of choice likes your content and promotes it via the algorithm, which sets you up for success.
To improve your reach, reconsider your hashtag strategy, whether your content is catchy enough, and of course, use a call to action to encourage your followers to share your content.
Impressions
While reach measures how many people your content has reached, impression is about how many times your content has been viewed.
This is often higher than your reach metric because people may look at your content multiple times – which is exactly what you want!
A user will likely have to view your content several times before crowning you with a follow request, so having a high impression rate means that you are well on your way to building a loyal fanbase.
To improve your impression metric, consider the type of content you are creating, improve your copywriting and consider adding videos to your content marketing strategy – which generate 50% more impressions on average!).
Growth rate
Growth rate tracks the efficiency of your content as means of growing your follower list.
A growth rate is what we call an exponential metric: it’s not uncommon to see this number violently increase over a short period of time, only to slow down massively at one point.
The growth rate is calculated as a percentage with the following formula:
GR = New followers/ followers two weeks ago x 100%
You can also calculate the growth rate over a one-week, month or even one-year period, depending on your posting frequency – the more you post, the more often you should calculate the growth rate.
Note that a high growth rate proportionally grows based on your engagement rate and vice versa.
Engagement rate
Engagement rate tracks how many of your impressions have interacted with your content in terms of likes, shares, comments or clicks.
A high engagement rate is often synonymous with high-quality content and a very strong indication that your audience is cultivating a strong loyalty to your brand.
Engagement rate calculates what percentage of your audience engages with your brand opposed to your total audience. “Audience” is a term that defines anyone who has seen your post, rather than those who follow you.
Measuring engagement rate heavily depends on the metric you are most interested in. For example, a social media marketer that aims to be discovered by a large audience may want to calculate engagement rate based on the amount of “likes” a post gets, while one that aims to establish themselves well in a small niche may want a high number of comments and interactions regardless of how large their audience is.
Engagement rate depends on the platform you are using – Tiktok boasts the highest average ER, while Facebook is the most disappointing one, with a meek 0.06% of your audience engaging with your post on average.
Virality rate
Wouldn’t you want your content to go viral?
Turns out, you can calculate the likelihood of your page going viral. Virality rate calculates shares based on how many impressions you have achieved – a high virality rate means that your post is easy to share among people that aren’t your followers.
Every share expands your reach and generates more impression. So, if a user shares your content, then one of their followers shares your content and so on, your virality rate will be incredibly high.
To make a viral piece of content, there are a number of things you can do – but creating good content is the single most important thing to do.
To calculate Virality Rate, use this formula:
VR = (shares/impressions) x 100
And the most important metrics for social media ads
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The Click-through rate is the single most important aspect of a paid media campaign. It tracks how efficient your advertisement is at getting clicks, or in better terms, how attractive your content is.
To calculate CTR, use this formula:
CTR =(clicks/impressions) x 100
An average Click-through rate of 2-3% is good, but performance marketing aims for around 10%, which is an incredibly impressive number for any social media strategist out there.
Conversion rate
Conversion rate tracks how many of those clicks turn into followers, sales or qualified leads. This is perhaps the most important metric of a performance-driven social media campaign as it directly impacts how high your Return On Investment will be.
Conversion Rate also shows you how valuable your audience is finding your social media to be, as well as how likely they are of buying from you again.
CR can be optimised through a Conversion Rate Optimisation service.
Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
Cost per click tracks how much spending is needed for each click your advertisement gets. A low cost per click is a good metric to have.
Note: Cost-Per-Click is directly proportional to how much competition you have, as well as your marketing budget. Industries like real estate and clothing will have a higher cost-per-click than, let’s say, someone that exclusively sells groceries.
CPC defines how profitable your paid social media campaign is and even your overall Return On Investment (ROI), which we are obsessed about.
To get a profitable CPC metric, it’s smart to run campaigns targeting very small niches within your audience – so, for example, exclusively targeting single mums under 40 that live in a certain area, and in a separate campaign, students above 18 years old with interest in online role-playing games. Or just target your roommate, as this guy did some while ago.
How to make your campaign more successful
As we stressed over and over again, focusing on the metrics is guaranteed to turn your simple social media page into a profitable lead magnet.
However, there is not a lot you can do to improve your metric if you don’t focus on creating better and better content for your audience to enjoy.
We have created a variety of articles on content optimisation which you’ll find in our blog, but on top of that, here is some advice for you to implement in your social media campaign today:
- Use authentic content that resonates within your brand. Your audience loves a brand to be all about the human behind the screen, and if you sound like a corporate robot, you won’t create a strong B2B or B2C campaign.
- Take advantage of all of your social media’s tools. Instagram’s vast array of interactive stickers such as quizzes, polls, sliders, AMA and more will allow you to create a very engaged audience to regularly interact with.
Not only these can be used in stories, but their engagement can also create more content for you to share (also known as User Generated Content). - Hashtags are one of the things you can optimise to achieve maximum performance! The right mix of popular (and yet-to-be discovered) hashtags will propel your reach to the stars, allowing you to be discovered by a wide variety of people and niches.
Stay away from spammy hashtags such as #followforfollow or #instagood. They are just terrible.
And finally, remember to have fun! Social media marketing is one of the most creative jobs a marketer can handle, and to create high quality content, there’s nothing better than topflight Agency’s vast array of guides for you to look at.
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Alex Grossi
