Elevate Your Social Media Skills: 3 Essential Metrics to Monitor
Let's get nitty gritty today. Do you watch your social account metrics but sit there wondering, "Okay, but what do I really need to focus on?" And when you try and search for simple explanations on what metrics to track and why, you're left with a laundry list of different opinions. I want to help you make your digital marketing efforts as efficient and practical as possible. Below are the three metrics I track every month, as well as the kinds of content I post to help support the growth of each metric.
Engagement Rate
This is the measurement of comments, likes, and shares. This metric helps you understand your posts' impact on your audience and how much they value your content. Some easy ways to increase your engagement rate are:
Posts asking your audience a questions
Asking your audience to ask you a question
Sharing customer success/testimonials
Impressions
This measurement focuses on the number of times your content was viewed by an account. This includes how many times a single account viewed your content. This varies from Reach because Reach only focuses on how many unique accounts viewed your content. In contrast, Impressions include multiple views from one account in its calculation. This is an important metric to track to understand how far out your content is going. This can help you know your number of likes because if your impressions are lower, there's no need to fret if you only get a few likes! Some easy ways to focus on increasing your impression metric:
Share about you and your story - show the human side of your brand/business/company.
Share something compelling, like a statistic that someone will want to share with another individual.
Share a humorous post.
Follows
This metric is easy to understand and track (yay!). It also makes sense why it's essential. One point of clarification, however, is that I tend to look at "who's" following me versus just an increase in follows. Suppose the follower isn't a part of my target market. In that case, my content might not resonate and might not contribute to my impressions or engagement growth.
How often do you check these metrics?
I suggest keeping a record of the numbers once a month as you continue to run your business. It will help you see where things are working/not working and allow you to give yourself a "pat on the back" and tell yourself, "I'm doing it. I'm making it happen." I think it's so easy to get hyper-focused on follower count or another specific metric. Still, by taking the time to look at your metrics holistically, you can experience the freedom of knowing your efforts are making a difference even if you cannot see it clearly in the day-to-day.
To help increase general impressions on your social accounts, I have created a free download sharing of top ways to raise awareness of your catholic biz. Check it out in the resource center here.
I hope this gives you peace of mind in knowing all of this is in God's timing and that you can confidently track your metrics, pivot when you need to, and leave the rest to God.