If you are planning a social media overhaul in 2024, or even if you simply want to establish a set of goals including higher interaction or more followers, then social media metrics are something that you will need to get your head around.

Social metrics are the components that denote and underpin social media success. They focus on different goals and areas of your social strategy, spanning everything from your follower count to the amount of engagement each post receives, the click through rate on your paid ads, and the number of shares that your posts get.

It will come as no surprise to you that the more social metrics you can access and interpret, the better your ability to plan and plot future content and subsequent success will be. But which metrics really matter, and which should you be focussing on to boost the success of your social media in 2024?

Let’s take a closer look at the metrics we recommend focussing on, depending on your goal.

What is the value of social media metrics?

In short, social media metrics allow you to track how well your social media profiles are performing, so that you can build a strategy which optimises your success and improves areas where your performance may be lacking.

It can prove a useful tool in determining which platforms to focus on, where your marketing is proving to be the most efficient in terms of conversion, and which style of posts your followers find the most engaging.

Social metrics allow you to build a strategy which frames future social posting - and in a world where consistency across platforms is key, the importance of this cannot be overstated.

Which metrics are most important?

Depending on your social media goals for 2024, and how you choose to use social as part of your overall digital marketing strategy, your approach to and emphasis on these four areas may differ. However, on the whole these are the four areas that you need to focus on.

Engagement

Engagement is, for many of our clients, a core goal across all of their social media platforms. Measuring engagement across all of the platforms that you are on is a good way of recognising and deducing where your customers and audience spend the most time and can help you to distinguish the types of content that they find the most useful.

Tracking social media engagement means looking at how many likes, shares, and comments each post gets. It can also include metrics which allow you to see which videos have been viewed in full, and how long customers spend on your profile.

Reach

Social media reach is what tells you how many people are seeing your social posts, your stories, reels, and updates. Interestingly, it can tell you what proportion of your reach is made up of followers and how many of those reach are not followers - then letting you see how many decide to become followers as a result of seeing your content.

This is particularly useful to those who use social media ads and paid advertising, as it allows them to see just how successful their demographic is and where they could improve it.

Conversion

There are a few different ways that social media metrics can track conversion, depending on the type of action that you want users to take. Generally, social media conversion is tracked by looking at how many users click to view your profile, leave your profile via a website link on your profile, or click on a paid ad to view or find out more.

This is a metric which directly tells you how successful your social campaign has been in igniting the interest of users and can be a great way to strategise and frame future campaigns and launches.

Service

Finally, if social media forms a part of your customer service strategy, then you can use metrics to not only track response time and the receipt of direct messages, but also how satisfied users are with your responses, comments, and answers to their questions. Remember, social media is a primarily sociable tool for users, so if you leave your DMs open to their questions, and ask for comments from users, then you should be in a position to respond.

Understanding social media metrics can be overwhelming at times- with more data to track and process than ever before. Let Social Loop help you make sense of the data, using it to frame future decisions, strategies, and campaigns with ease. For information about our social media management services, get in touch today.