You’ve optimised your social media profile, implemented a social media marketing plan and are nailing writing punchy posts. But are you effectively analysing its performance?

What you choose to report ultimately comes down to your marketing and business objectives. But here’s what we consider to be the most important metrics to look at and some jargon-busting tips to help…

Making a good Impression

One of the most important metrics, measuring awareness of your post, is the number of impressions it receives. Quite simply, the more impressions your post has, the more people have seen it.

Make a record of all your posts and track the number of impressions. Is there a particular subject matter or post format (e.g. a carousel, poll, image etc.) that achieves a higher number? If there is, tailor your content plan by focusing on topics you know to be of interest to your clients and prospects.

Get your followers to click

Clicks and click-through rate (CTR) is a measure of engagement with your content and is quite simply what it says!

How many people have interacted with your post by actively clicking on it? Your CTR is shown as a %, which is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions (multiplied by 100).

The higher the CTR, the more engagement your post has had.

Reactions, comments and re-posts

The following steps are all about driving deeper engagement with your content, with the aim of increasing brand sentiment and growing the number of account followers.

Step one - are people moved enough to react to your post by liking, loving, celebrating it?

Step two – can you take that interaction a step further, by encouraging people to write a comment in response to your post? This demonstrates a next level of engagement beyond someone just reacting to it.

Step three – is your post so engaging that people want to re-post and share it with their own connections and followers? This is the holy grail of extending your post’s reach wider.

So, now you know what some of the key metrics to monitor are, what next?

A simple way to report overall engagement for a post is to add up the number of clicks, reactions, comments and reposts it receives. Divide this by the number of impressions for an engagement %.

Don’t forget to follow this process across all the social media channels your company uses to compare and contrast engagement results across platforms. To help you see what this could look like and get your started, use our simple template here.

And finally, adding these metrics to your monthly marketing performance plan or dashboard is a great way to show the value of investing your time in your social media marketing to drive business growth.