Is it working?

The Importance of Understanding Metrics

Owning a small business comes with many responsibilities. There are parts to love and parts to endure. Some parts come easily to do and others are more challenging. Metrics in social media have always been one of those things that are easy to put off because it’s not the fun part unless you’re a numbers person. Metrics is also tricky to understand when the rules (algorithms) are changing rapidly. Keeping up with best practices can be difficult.

Metrics are important to understand so the content that generates good numbers can be duplicated. It’s helpful for content planning and direction. When it’s easy to see what’s working, resources can be allocated to do more of that.

Social media metrics involve many different numbers to track, but some are more helpful than others. If you’re at the beginning of tracking metrics, this post will simplify where you should start.

• Audience demographics

• Follower count & growth

• Engagement rate

• Impressions

• Reach

Audience demographics

Audience demographics are arguably the most valuable information to a small business owner seeking organic growth on social media. Knowing your audience demographics is vital to understanding the people who follow your page or view your posts. Demographics are metrics about your audience including location, gender; top age ranges, and followers and non-followers that have interacted with your content.

Understanding who follows your content can reveal a few things. 

1. Whether or not your content attracts the types of followers you hoped or desired.

2. How to better craft and tailor your message both for the audience you have and the audience you desire.

Audience demographics are beneficial. It’s imperative to understand who follows you, when they’re online, why they’re following you, and how they think.

Follower counts & growth

Follower counts and growth is not always a metric that reflects the quality of your content. You may be producing great content, but your follower count is small. With over 50 million people producing content on social media, it’s easy to feel like you’re not doing a good job if you have a small following. Similar to the popularity metrics of high school, follower count is not always the best metric to reflect your work. 

However, it is still beneficial to pay attention to this number. As your follower count grows, it’s growing because people found your business and need your service. (This is where you work on conversion.) It can also be because they like your content and seek to engage in some way. (Also a good place to work on conversion from being a viewer to a commenter.) It is exciting to see a follower count increase, and this is not a bad goal. It’s just not the only goal.

Engagement rate

Engagement rate is a great metric. Engagement rate is a measure of how much of your audience actively engages with your content. In social media marketing, it measures the amount of interaction a piece of content gets compared to reach, followers, or audience size. You can be producing great, informative content, but without engagement, it doesn’t matter much. That’s why we prefer this metric to follower count.

The engagement rate is calculated using different pieces of information across various platforms. Posts, comments, likes, shares, saves, and even profile visits factor into the engagement rate.

Hootsuite has a great (and free!) engagement rate calculator here.

Impressions

Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed. This means that the content was delivered to someone’s feed whether they viewed the content or not. Think of a business you follow and you realize that you haven’t seen their content in a while. If they’re posting, it was delivered to your feed or displayed whether you viewed it or not. You may also have seen a post and that’s an impression as well – even if you saw the content multiple times.

Reach

Reach is the total number of unique people who view your content. Impressions are the total number of times your content was displayed whether it was viewed or not. Impressions and reach are both valuable numbers to understand and to track. Impressions would include content that is viewed by one person, shared by another person and the first person saw it twice…or more times. Reach is each unique person who views your content once. 

Tracking metrics

Tracking metrics can seem difficult and daunting. When you begin to look at these numbers it can be both, but as you view them more you will begin to notice patterns in content that reflect what’s working and what’s not. 

On Facebook in the Meta Business Suite, you will need to go under the Insights tab to see a variety of metrics. You can also go to the Content tab and click on individual posts to see engagement rate, impressions, and reach. This is a good place to spend some time as you gain a better understanding of tracking metrics.

Flywheel Marketing can help with social media content creation as well as metrics tracking. Our clients see benefits from our strategic planning to grow organically online. We would love to work with you! Consultations are free. Click the button to get started.