Creating content is an exciting process. You start with a great message, then you jump into a fun creative journey, and finally, you get to share it with the world. But how do you get the world to listen?
We rely on many different social media platforms to distribute our messages. All of those platforms offer ways to scope out social media analytics. When brands come up with a content marketing strategy, they are aiming to do things like gain impressions, maximize reach, increase engagement, and generate leads using a buyer’s journey. It’s important to dive into each of these metrics to fully understand where your company is doing a great job, and where you need to bring more focus.
1. Mastering Social Media Analytics: Impressions
Impression is a metric that shows how many times your content has been shown to an audience. You are reading this blog right now, which means this blog just received one impression. Even if you don’t read it all the way through, the impression still counts. If you come back later and read this blog one more time, that’s 2 impressions. Impressions are simply the number of times a piece of content has been displayed.
You can track two kinds of impressions:
- Viewable Impressions: at least 50% of the ad/content was in view on the page, which means it is likely that someone saw it.
- Served Impressions: your ad/content was loaded on a page, regardless of its location on the page.
When it comes to social media, an impression counts as soon as it’s on a person’s feed. Every time a person comes back to the content, another impression is counted.
2. Mastering Social Media Analytics: Reach
Reach is the total number of unique individuals who have seen your content. Another phrase for this is Unique Impressions. A single viewer watching a video twice will get that video 2 impressions, but the reach will remain at 1.
Your reach will normally be lower than your impressions.
No matter how many times an individual sees a piece of content, it will only count for 1 reach per person. Your reach will almost always be lower than your impressions, and that’s normal. Reach plays a key part in determining your engagement rate, and it’s an important metric to understand when figuring out how successful your content is.
3. Mastering Social Media Analytics: Engagement and Engagement Rate
In social media analytics, engagement refers to any action that the viewer takes, whether that’s a like, comment, or share. Popular posts will have high numbers of engagement. However, your reach will usually be higher than your engagement. The reason for this is not everyone who sees your content is going to engage with it. That is completely normal, and it’s important to know how to healthily encourage engagement without pushing your audience.
There is a special distinction between engagement and engagement rate. Your engagement will be the number of interactions (likes, shares, and comments). Your engagement rate will tell you the number of engagements as it relates to your reach. It can also demonstrate how your number of total engagements relates to your impressions.
If your engagement rate is 10%, that means 10% of either your impressions or reach (depending on which one you measure with) engaged with your content. It’s important to have a high engagement rate, more so than having a ton of followers. Even if your posts are getting 10 likes, if those 10 likes are out of 50 people who saw your engagement, that is an amazing engagement rate of 20%.
ENGAGEMENT ÷ UNIQUE USERS or ENGAGEMENT ÷ IMPRESSIONS
= ENGAGEMENT RATE
Most big Instagram accounts only have an engagement rate of 1-3%. Accounts with a small, genuine following of less than 1,000 have an average engagement rate of 8%. That’s an amazing engagement rate, and engagement generates leads! On the flip side, it is great to have a higher number of people viewing your content. Keeping track of your engagement rate helps you prioritize what you want in your content marketing strategy.
4. Mastering Social Media Analytics: Clicks
Clicks are pretty self-explanatory: They refer to the number of clicks you get on an ad or a piece of content. When you look at your clicks in relation to your impressions, you can find your click-through rate, otherwise known as CTR. CTR is calculated by dividing the total impressions by the number of clicks you got on a post.
= Click-through rate
CLICKS ÷ IMPRESSIONS
Here’s an example of the click-through rate in action: say you are running a Facebook ad designed to drive traffic to a landing page. If you got 5,000 impressions on the ad, and received 265 clicks, your CTR would be 5.3%.
To review social media analytics, impression is the number of times content has been shown, reach is the number of people who have seen the post, and engagement is the number of likes, shares, comments, and clicks the content gets.
Where does your follower count fit in to the quest for healthy social media analytics? Of course, followers shouldn’t be your sole focus, but it is great to increase genuine followers, because they improve your impressions, engagement, reach, clicks, and leads. In turn, all those things attract even more followers, who notice your growing platform.
When people have chosen to follow you, they are more likely to see your content prioritized on their newsfeed, which boosts your impressions, and in turn, engagement and reach.
As you understand and track these metrics for your own social media accounts, you can more easily determine how you’re performing and what to laser-focus on. Doubling down on your content marketing strategy by consistently updating your approach and knowing where you stand in the social media world is a fantastic way to achieve fast content marketing success. Along with this, keep delivering content of the best quality, and you’ll be on your way upwards. 🐢
