What those social media metrics actually mean

When you look at your social media data or hear people talk about metrics there are some confusing terms that get thrown around. “Impressions. Reach. Engagement rate.” But what do these really mean? Let’s break them down.

Why social media metrics matter?

First off, social media metrics are the numbers that tell you if you’re tracking toward success. When you create your SMART goal part of the M: measurement section is defining how you will measure your goal.

For example, let’s say your goal is to increase awareness of your business on social media. The metrics you’ll want to track are reach, impressions and shares. Are more people seeing your content over time? If so, then you are successfully increasing the awareness of your brand.

Social media metrics are important because they can tell you if your efforts are working or what might need to be adjusted. It’s key to check-in with your progress. If you aren’t seeing the outcome that you’d like, this is a good indicator that you’ll need to make some changes.

What those metrics mean

Now let’s define what some of these social media metrics mean.

Impressions: the number of times your content was seen

Reach: the unique number of viewers who saw your content

The difference between these two can get a little confusing. Reach will generally be lower than impressions. This is because the algorithms may push a piece of content to someone more than once.

Let’s say you have a post with a reach of 300. This means 300 people had your post show up on their social media feed. But the impressions is 400. This is because of those 300 people, some had the post show up more than once and therefore your content was seen 400 times by 300 people.

Engagement: interactions with your content

Average engagement rate: number of interactions a post receives relative to your total number of followers

Engagement can come in different forms. It can be liking, sharing, commenting, retweeting and/or quote tweeting.

It’s great to get engagement on a post because this means your audience found it valuable. A person took the time to show that your post had an effect on them. You’ll want to note if a post gets a lot of engagement and ask yourself why. See if you can identify a reason and as you continue to create content, do more what works and less of what doesn’t.

As for average engagement rate, this is an interesting percentage to track because it notes of the people who follow you how many are interacting with your content. These are the people most invested in your brand. If they aren’t engaging that’s a problem.

But are these numbers even good?

As you start to track your social media metrics you may wonder if your metrics are well “good”.

The honest answer is it’s all relative. Sure, you can look up industry averages and track yourself against those. You can go and calculate your top competitors average engagement rate and compare it to your own.

My advice is to set metrics for yourself and then consistently track them over time. Create your SMART goal and define how you will track success.

Let’s go back to our first example of increasing awareness. Let’s say your posts over a three month period receive an average reach of 300 and an average impression of 400. Continue to track those metrics in the exact same way over the same three month time period and see if your average reach and impressions increases. If so, that’s a success.

I want to keep learning

That’s great! Join me for my brand new SkillPop class: Master Social Media Analytics.

In the 90 minute virtual classroom we’ll cover where to find your data, keep talking about what terms mean, how to know which metrics matter, and how to use your data to take your social media marketing to the next level.

The next class is January 27 at 5:30 EST. Register here for only $20. Hope to see you there!