When it comes to social media measurement, which metrics should you be focussing on to ensure you’re meeting business targets? And, perhaps more importantly, what can you forget about?

Let’s take a look…

Link Clicks

When using Facebook Insights it’s easy to see the overall clicks people have made on a post. However, it’s more useful to look at specific link clicks, which can tell you which of the links have proven most popular.

Conversions

A big talking point in this office, and every other comms HQ, conversions are the end-goal results of any online journey. It might be a form-fill, purchase or newsletter sign up, either way it’s all a conversion if someone takes action. This is one of the best ways to judge ROI on your campaign.

Button clicks

Like link clicks, button clicks are the number of times people are clicking on a button within a social advert— for example ‘Buy Now’, ‘Contact Us’, or ‘Speak To The Team’. Assessing this can help prioritise advert content going forward and learn about audience behavioural patterns.

Relevance

Facebook’s algorithm will always favour adverts that are deemed relevant to the target market, scoring them between 1 (poor) and 10 (excellent). The higher the score the more visible they will be. To test this it’s wise to launch the same ad across different demographics and see the levels of conversions and clicks from each.

Engagement

We talk about Engagement all the time when discussing social media measurement. This basically means all interactions from the public. So that could be likes, retweets, comments, follows, shares and similar. It’s important not to get too bogged down in these as they are not the most accurate gauge of success, but analysis can quickly show what content is proving popular overall.

Reach / Impressions

It’s vital that you understand the difference here. In the simplest terminology reach is the number of individual people (or accounts) that were exposed to your post, impressions are the number of times a post has been seen, including views by the same person (or account).

The problem is neither offers as good an analysis of a post’s success as link clicks; it’s possible to amass impressions and reach without anyone actually taking on board the post amid the noise of social media, let along following the link through to your chosen landing page.

Essential AND not-so-essential

By now you might be wondering which of these social media measurement metrics are essential, and which you can forget about. In truth, it really depends on what business goals you want to achieve with your social media output. Whatever the answer to that, remember no single metric can reign supreme— it’s only when you combine several that a proper picture can be painted.