We’re a Social Media Manager’s BFF (after cats) Loomly helps you create better content, faster.
Whether you are an entrepreneur, an emerging brand, an established company or an agency, here is to boosting your productivity and your success!We are sure you will agree with us when we say:
“Social media analytics can be confusing and time-consuming.”One look at the long list of metrics available is enough to overwhelm even the most hardened social media manager.
Never mind working out how to interpret them all.
But, it doesn’t have to be this way.
There is an easy method to understand and use social media metrics.
In fact, it can make the process simpler, faster and more time-efficient than you thought possible.
Leaving you with more time to focus on your strategy and making a difference to your followers.
You know, the stuff you love.
In this guide, we are going to show you how to unlock the power of social media analytics, and finally use them to your advantage.
Read on to find out more.
Why You Need Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics help you to become a social media manager who gets their audience.They make you smarter, more empathetic and provide you with a clear vision of what your fans/followers/users/customers want or need.
Let’s face it:
We all know social media usage reveals a lot about people.
What they like, share, comment on and subscribe to can provide clear insight into who they truly are.
(Or, at least, who they want to be.)
This is great news for you:
Because the data their actions create leaves a trail of breadcrumbs to your ideal social media strategy.
Social media analytics allow you to see the real-time impact of your updates:
- You can track what works, what doesn’t, and how well you are engaging people.
- You can see if your updates are creating owners and leaders, or if you are just another page in a busy news feed.
“Going viral is not an outcome; it’s a happening. Sometimes it happens; sometimes it doesn’t. Just remember, fans are vanity and sales are sanity.”
Every action you take creates a data imprint, and if you interpret the results correctly, they can have real practical implications for your business.
Let us explain:
Where Social Media Meets Your Sales Funnel
When gurus exclaim:“Don’t sell on social media!”they are wrong.
Really wrong.
Why?
Because all social media is selling, even if we don’t realize it.
Social media sits right at the top of your sales funnel in the “awareness” section.
It’s one of the first entry points into your funnel:
At the awareness stage, people are looking for:
- Answers
- Insights
- Data
- Entertainment
Depending on your business, a conversion might look like:
- E-commerce: product purchase.
- SaaS: sign up for your free trial, or outright product purchase.
- Blog: email subscription.
- Service business: appointment, reservation or consultation booking.
- Mobile app: download.
At the most basic level, your social media analytics platform will show you:
- How well you bring people into your funnel (impressions into follows).
- How much engagement you get (followers/impressions into engagements).
- How many people you turn into traffic (link clicks).
- How much of your traffic converts to your desired goal (UTM tracking).
But to get the most out of these metrics — and the ones you will read about later in this article — you need to understand how people are engaged.
To do that, let’s talk about pyramids:
The Engagement Pyramid: Your Ladder To Conversion
The Engagement Pyramid is the journey a user follows after they become aware of your brand’s online presence.Think of it a little like a ladder.
The further a user moves up the pyramid, the more engaged and bought-in to your content they become. These people are highly likely to convert and grow your business with word-of-mouth recommendations:
Let’s take a look at how this journey might look for a user.
Sarah (we just made her up) is interested in language learning, and she is about to become aware of your company:
- Observation: Sarah wants to learn French, and a friend tags her in your Facebook update, “Five Fabulous Phrases For Fast French Fluency.”
- Following: Sarah enjoys the post and likes your Page.
- Endorsing: Sarah sees your next post about French food and decides to share it.
- Contributing: Sarah leaves comments on your updates, participates in your live Q&A, and even asks to write a guest blog post.
- Owning: Sarah feels a real affiliation with you and wants to reciprocate. She buys a course.
- Leading: Sarah is impressed. She buys your next product and refers to all of her French learning friends.
Your social media statistics can give you the insights to see how much of your audience is at each level. Although you can’t see this on a person-by-person level, you can see the aggregated split in your audience. The more people you’re moving to the top, the better.
Okay, so we have gotten pretty deep into why you need to measure your social media analytics. Let’s start to look at what metrics you need to track.
But first:
How To Approach Social Media Analytics
You will be glad to know you don’t need to be a numbers genius to use social media analytics.All you need to know is how to run a test and understand the life-cycle of a social media update.
Take a look at the chart below:
You can see the first steps are about content creation. You get inspiration, create, approve and schedule your posts from your social media calendar.
Analytics comes into play after you have shared, in the reporting, learning and optimization stages.
The data you find here will inform:
- What you publish: the types of content you need to create to engage your audience.
- How you publish: the specifics which make your content, from the date and time, through to the social visuals and specific copywriting you use.
- Create your updates and share them.
- Use a social media reporting tool to get the data for your key metrics.
- Dig in to find out what caused each of these metrics.
- Use the data to create your next wave of updates.
- Wash, rinse and repeat.
Well, lucky for you, we have got 70 of them for you right here:
The 70 Social Media Metrics You Need To Track
Every social media platform comes with a unique set of metrics.Why?
Because the psychology of each platform is different. When you’re scrolling Facebook profiles, you’re in a different mindset to when you are on Pinterest, and LinkedIn comes with a different intent to Quora.
Here is a quick, simple cheat sheet summarizing each social media platform’s unique value proposition and what to take advantage of it for:
Knowing what metrics you need to measure is essential to developing a profitable content strategy.
After all, each business has different needs: a furniture upcycling side-hustle has many different needs to a viral news site, and the metrics they need to track will be different (Reviews vs. Shares).
In this section, we are going to break down each of the metrics and help you decide for yourself which metrics you will need to pay attention to.
They’ll all be broken down into one of these three categories:
- Post-level metrics: measuring the performance of each post you share.
- Account-level metrics: measuring how people interact with your account (or social media page).
- Link-level metrics: measuring the performance of a link you share on your page.
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