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4 Unsung Social Media Metrics That Matter

By Imagewërks -

With its varied opportunities for building brand awareness and fostering customer engagement, social media has more than earned its place in the digital marketing mix over the past decade.

Better still, social platforms offer unprecedented insights into consumer behavior and campaign performance. In fact, social’s analytical tools today are so robust it can be overwhelming. What should you track? Which metrics matter? And what do those metrics really mean to your bottom line?

Below are four unsung metrics you should be tracking to measure your social campaign’s effectiveness—and prove whether or not it is delivering the ROI you expect.

1. Bounce rate

Click-throughs are an important measurement of how much interest your social content is generating, but they don’t tell the whole story. Google Analytics also allows you to track bounce rate—or how often visitors who clicked through viewed only that one page before leaving your site.

Ideally, all your channels are attempting to drive traffic to the site and keep them there as long as possible. By comparing the bounce rate from social click-throughs with the bounce rates from all other traffic-drivers (paid ads, organic search, etc.), you can get a truer sense of how valuable social media is within your overall digital marketing strategy.

2. Traffic share

You’re likely already tracking how many visitors social is driving to your site. But don’t just look at raw numbers. Look at the share of overall traffic social is generating in comparison with your other channels.

Google Analytics allows you to see how all your campaign efforts rank and breaks it out in percentages of traffic share. Even if social’s numbers seem small in isolation, its contribution may make much more of an impression when viewed in the larger context.  

3. Social share of voice

Tracking mentions gives you a great way to quantify how much buzz your brand is creating on social media platforms. But you can go deeper by tracking your competitors’ mentions too.

Add your mentions with all your competitors to determine an “industry mentions” total. Divide your mentions by the total to get the percentage of overall mentions that belongs to you—that’s your social share of voice within the industry.

The nice thing about this metric is that, no matter what the result is, it proves to higher-ups that the competition is out there on the platforms—so your company better be too.

4. Amplification rate

Again, this metric brings greater context to another easily tracked metric: shares. Because all things are relative, it makes sense to look at shares in terms of the number of followers you have. (If you’re a local business, you don’t want to be comparing your overall share totals to Nike to determine success.)

To figure out your amplification rate, divide the number of times a piece of content was shared with the total number of followers, fans or likes. The resulting percentage gives you a better idea how relevant and engaging your content is to the followers you have—and how effective it is at turning those followers into brand ambassadors.

So there you have it. While leads, subscribers and sales are the metrics that will truly determine the success of your social media campaign, there are deeper insights that can shed new light on how engaging your message is with your audience—and how valuable your social outreach is within the context of your larger marketing push. Social media is a slow and steady march toward conversion. But if you do a little digging, you’re more likely to impact the bottom line.

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