The success of your social media efforts is dependent upon what goals your business wants to achieve.

Just because you have the most followers compared to your competitors doesn’t mean you have achieved social media success. Unless, of course, your only goal is to build awareness for your brand.

See what I mean? Let’s dive into what social media metrics you should be keeping an eye on for different sets of business goals. We’ll tell you what to measure, and where those metrics can be found.

Increasing brand awareness

A lot of businesses, especially new or small ones, are just looking to get their name out there. While increasing the brand awareness of your business seems to be a very generic task, it’s not as easy as you’d think.

Within your social media, there are a few specific metrics to keep an eye on if increasing awareness is your main focus.

• Followers
  Where to find: Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, LinkedIn Analytics
  • This one’s pretty simple. How many people have deemed your business’s social accounts as worthy enough to keep an eye on?

• Shares / Retweets
  Where to find: Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, LinkedIn Analytics
  • Tracking shares and retweets helps you get a sense of how much your content is being shared beyond your own followers. This is important because it helps you expand your reach to new audiences and increase your overall awareness.

• Reach / Potential Reach
  Where to find: Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, LinkedIn Analytics
  • Reach shows you how many people actually saw your social post, while potential reach is how many people COULD have seen your post, whether or not they actually did. Either way, this helps you get an understanding for how widespread your content is becoming.
• Impressions
  Where to find: Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, LinkedIn Analytics
  • Impressions is a little more nailed down than reach or potential reach. It allows you to see how many times your post was displayed to other users.

Targeting a specific audience

In general, it’s good practice to have an established target audience, or personas, that your business wants to focus on as potential customers. Once you have identified those, you will want to start to target your content towards that audience.

If this is something you want to focus on with your social media, here are a few audience demographics metrics to follow.

• Audience demographics
  Where to find: Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, LinkedIn Analytics
  • The following metrics will help paint a picture for you as to who follows your brand’s social media accounts: percent of followers by gender, age group, job industry, job seniority and location.
    • Keep in mind, these numbers may vary by social media platform, as different platforms are better for different demographics in general.

Generating leads

Now that you’ve addressed your brand awareness and reached out to your target audience, you’ll want to start converting your visitors into leads for your business. The best way to do this is to post content that is enticing to your target audience, but also gated. This means before they can get the offer, your visitors will have to provide some information, usually their name and email address, so you can reach out to them in the future.

Once you’re focused on generating leads for your business, use these metrics.

• Clicks / Click rate
  Where to find: Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, LinkedIn Analytics
  • Monitoring click rates helps you understand what makes your audience want to click on links. This also helps you figure out if your content offerings are in line with what your target audience is interested in.

• Referral traffic
  Where to find: Google Analytics
  • In Google Analytics, you can track traffic to your website from different referral sources, including social media. This is the one you’ll want to keep your eye on for generating leads.

While it’s important to monitor all of your social media activity, some metrics may be more important depending on the goals you’re trying to achieve.

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