Social Media Engagement Metrics and How to Use Them

Social media engagement metrics might seem overwhelming or meaningless when you first look at them. But it might just be that you aren’t sure which platforms are best for your company. In reality, measuring social media metrics gives you a valuable window into the behaviour of your audience on social media. When used correctly, with this information you can:

• Find out more about what your ideal client wants to see
• Create even more relevant content to meet their needs
• Build brand awareness
• Generate conversions
• Succumb to your inner nerd

By keeping a log of your social media metrics, you can constantly keep an eye on what’s going well and what isn’t and be reactive in changing the performance for that month. This way, you can ‘beat’ last month’s engagement and conversions by breaking down what you can do differently. You might find a technique that works every time and is best to stick to. Or, you might experiment with different styles and measure the success of each until you find the best one. Even if you don’t quite nail it this month, by tracking social media metrics, you can see where you went wrong and set a practical and achievable target for next month in a way that fits with your brand.

Instagram metrics can be found in the mobile app by clicking on your profile, and ‘Insights’ in the burger menu. The Insights are split into three categories and only summarise data from the last week. But what do the terms actually mean? We’ve created a little glossary below:

Activity

The Activity section shows the activity your content generates.

• Profile visits – how many times your profile was visited in the last week
• Website clicks – how many times the link in your profile was clicked
• Reach – the total number of people have seen your content
• Impressions – how many times your content has been displayed, irrespective of engagement (whether it has been clicked, liked etc)

It can be difficult to understand the difference between Reach and Impressions so a way to remember it is: how many people you’ve reached and how many impressions you’ve made on these people.

The Content tab shows you a summary of your posts, how often you’ve posted, and an overview of the engagement for your posts and stories. You can flexibly change the timeframe you’re looking at and quickly gain an understanding of which posts and stories ranked highest in that timeframe.

This tab is all about the audience you follow, comprising of:

• How many followers you have
• The top locations of your followers
• Your follower age range
• The gender of your followers
• The time of day your followers are online

All this information is priceless as you can create content relevant to the top location, pitch your content to the right age group, create content relevant to the prevalent gender of your followers and schedule your posts to go live when your followers are most active.

Instagram Insights help you stand in your ideal client’s shoes and tap into who they are and what they want to see, growing your following and keeping them engaged.

The beauty of Twitter Analytics (found in Profile > More > Analytics) is that it keeps a rolling summary of each month. It’s still useful to export this into your own log for comparison purposes. The following categories are totalled up for the month:

• Tweets – to keep you up to date with how much you’ve been tweeting
• Impressions – how many times people see your content
• Mentions – how many people have tagged you or replied to you in a tweet
• Profile Visits – how many times your profile has been clicked on
• Followers – increase or decrease in follower numbers
• Top tweet – your highest performing tweet of the month

You can also click on ‘View all Tweet activity’ to see an in-depth analysis of each tweet from the month, such as Impressions, Engagements, Engagement Rate. Engagements refer to all clicks on the tweet, retweets, replies, follows, and likes.

Facebook Insights can be found at the top menu of the page in question. However, more in-depth stats can be found on Facebook Analytics which can be set up for your page. This data is best collected at the end of a calendar month. Insights cover the following:

• Actions on Page – this captures data on the number of clicks on your page’s contact info and CTA button
• Page Views – how many times your page has been viewed
• Page Previews – the number of times people have hovered over your profile picture for more information
• Page Likes – the number of times your page has been liked
• Post Reach – how many people you have reached through your content
• Recommendations – how many times your page has been recommended to others
• Post Engagements – the number of likes, comments, shares etc of a post

LinkedIn also splits its analytics into three categories and can be viewed at any time of the month:

• Visitors – tracks your page views, unique visitors and custom button clicks as well as the job roles of the people visiting your page
• Updates – tracks reactions, comments, and shares of your posts as well as giving you a detailed breakdown of the performance of all your posts
• Followers – shows the number of your followers, a timeline of your follower gains and losses, the locations of your followers by percentage, and your page’s performance compared to that of competitors.

Pinterest has just given its analytics interface a facelift and we like it. The Overview tool is wonderfully flexible as it lets you choose your timeframe and the metric you want to measure so you can see which pins do better or worse than others through the following social media engagement metrics:

• Impressions – the number of times your pins are seen
• Engagements – the number of times someone engages with your pin
• Close-ups – the number of times your pin is clicked on and expanded to a bigger size
• Link clicks – the number of times the link your pin directs to is clicked on
• Saves – the number of times a pin is saved to someone else’s board
• Total audience – the number of people who have seen or engaged with your pins and boards
• Engaged audience – the number of people engaging with your pins

The Audience Insights show the size of your audience, the trending categories and interests within your audience, the age, gender and location of your audience, and the devices used by your audience.

These tools give you so much information about the behaviour of your followers. Dedicating a pocket of time each month to analyse and understand your social media performance will really impact the long game. Look at the posts reaching the most people, making the most impressions and generating the most website clicks. What is different about those posts? Try to emulate similar content and see how it performs while posting less of the type of content which doesn’t perform as well.

A central spreadsheet is a useful way to keep all the information in one place to help you analyse and compare social media engagement metrics month by month on each platform. To help you with the process we’ve created a template for you which can be downloaded here.

The spreadsheet helps keep tabs on what’s going on. At the end of the month, we use this to create an in-depth report, screenshots of top-performing content, what went well, what didn’t, and what we can do differently next month.

Maybe you need some help with finding meaning or setting goals in your social media reporting, or perhaps you just aren’t seeing social media growth no matter how hard you work at it. We offer social media management as a service and would love to work with you. Contact us today for a cup of tea and a chat about social media engagement metrics to how we can help! In the meantime, check out our blog post on creating a social media style guide.