Tracking social media analytics can be a bit daunting. There is so much analytical information you can access for free that it can become confusing on what stats to track. Information is worth tracking, but you don’t need to track everything to gain insights into what is happening with your social media channel. By tracking these five metrics on a month-to-month basis, you will gain valuable information on how your social media channels are performing and what you can do to improve them:
Followers
Followership is the easiest metric to track for your social media channels. This number represents the number of people who have liked or followed your social media account. Followers are people who have intentionally agreed to support your page and see your posts. Increase or decrease of followers from month to month can sometimes be correlated with other metrics, such as how often you posted or the content you posted.
Impressions
Impressions are the number of times your post enters someone’s screen. High impressions means more people are seeing your post. Each site has an ever-evolving algorithm to determine who sees what, so keeping track of impressions can help in the way you shape posts.
Time of Posting
The time a post goes live can affect the amount of impressions a post will get. As social media algorithms change, so do effective times to post. As a general rule, try to post when people will have time to be on social media. This may be during lunch or around the time the work day is ending. By tracking when posts go live and comparing their impressions, you may be able to pinpoint an hour in the day your audience is most receptive to interact with posts.
Interactions
Speaking of interactions, they are important to track too. Interactions include anything someone does to interact with a post. For example, likes, retweets, comments, shares, etc. More initial interactions on a post help increase impressions, which in turn can lead to more interactions.
Highest Performing Posts
All of these things combine to make high performing posts. Take a special look at your best posts to try to correlate what made it successful. Was it the time of day it was posted? The content? The interactions? Tracking high performing posts will give you more results to compare, which will over time help pinpoint specific things you can do to improve the effectiveness of posts.
You can enhance and improve your social media usage by tracking these five metrics. After a few months of collecting data, you will be able to compare and contrast what worked and what didn’t. From here, you can move forward with a strategic social media plan to increase effectiveness.