Your metrics are determined by your social media objectives. Every goal needs a corresponding statistic that can be used to assess if your social media strategy is succeeding or failing.
Analysing your metrics helps you improve or retain strategies that offer a lot of potential and abandon those that have been underwhelming to avoid further wasting your organisation’s resources.
To keep you focused on the proper growth goals in your efforts, here is an outline of the most crucial metrics that you should be tracking across each of the major social networks.
The reach metric shows you the size of the audience that has seen your content. In Instagram, the estimated reach is the total number of distinct logged-in users who saw a given piece of content.
This amount, however, is probably smaller than impressions because this statistic counts users rather than views.
In Twitter, impressions are how many times your tweet was displayed on a user’s timeline or in a hashtag search.
Impressions and/or reach demonstrates your success in attracting viewers to your content and offers crucial context for understanding other KPIs. You might need to reconsider a post, for instance, if it has an unexpectedly low number of interactions despite having a very high reach.
User support for a page or a piece of content can be expressed through “likes.” In Facebook and LinkedIn, users can also express their emotional responses more precisely by using “reactions.”
More reactions could lead to higher reach as Facebook uses them as a ranking signal.
The number of responses users have left under your post are referred to as “comments.” The term “shares” refers to the quantity of times people have shared content to their own feeds or transmitted it to others in direct messages.
Likes/reactions, comments and shares serve as social proof that your content is connecting well with your audience. These three help to understand user sentiment toward your content.
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When a video is played for at least three seconds on Facebook, it receives a “view.” In desktop mode, it must fill the entire screen, and in mobile mode, it must fill half the screen.
In most circumstances, even if a person did not finish your movie, a three-second view would show that they paused for it. A one-minute view reveals that people were attentive for a longer period of time.
In Instagram, a video play is the total number of times a user has watched your video or reel. Because many films are brief and automatically loop, this number can be more than you anticipate given your reach.
Meanwhile, TikTok counts a view from the moment a video starts playing, unlike other platforms. If a user loops your video multiple times, each loop will be counted as a view because this statistic also takes into account repeat plays.
For YouTube, views are what Google defines as “the number of legitimate views for your channel or films,” or, more specifically, views that a user consciously initiates (e.g., by searching or clicking a thumbnail). The site will temporarily freeze the number of views on a video if it discovers that they are questionable.
Long hours and hard work are needed to produce quality video content. The success of your efforts can be shown by the number of video plays, which indicates that viewers not only noticed but actually clicked on your content in their feeds.
Any time a user clicks an external link in your post to access further content, such as a page on your website, that action is referred to as a link click.
Link clicks demonstrate the effectiveness of your efforts. It’s important to assess the effectiveness of your posts through clicks if you’re using social media to advertise the goods or services on your website. When someone clicks on a link, it means that your post persuaded them to go to your website or view the content you were trying to promote.
If there aren’t many link hits on your posts, first think about if they’re compelling enough. Next, think about what kinds of information you are linking to that are appropriate for your audience.
You might also want to read: 6 communication fun facts you probably didn’t know (commsroom.co)
Jaw de Guzman is the content producer for Comms Room, a knowledge platform and website aimed at assisting the communications industry and its professionals.
