Social media metrics are essential for companies to track as they help businesses understand the performance of their social media efforts. However, between things like engagement percentages and follower counts, it's not always easy for companies to figure out which metrics are the most relevant for their business. Although not every metric is going to be important for every business to stay on top of to understand its social media performance, there are a few basic ones that every business should understand and pay attention to, based on the goals that the company wants to achieve.
Engagement
The engagement rate is a metric that companies can use to track how engaged the audience is with the content that the company is, and how effective social media campaigns truly are, as high engagement generally means a lot of audience interactions.. Each social media platform has metrics that show the engagement rate, which is a sum of a variety of smaller audience engagements, including things like likes, shares, or comments. Looking at engagement rates by post can show companies the types of content its audience finds interesting, however, it's important for companies to look at a variety of factors that could impact engagement such as time and date of posting or if a post is a giveaway etc..
Awareness
Both reach and impressions tend to fall under the umbrella of brand awareness and perception metrics, but they point to different things that companies can understand about their social media strategy performance, and they often tend to get confused with each other. At a post level, reach is the potential unique number of viewers that a post can have, while impressions are the number of times that the post shows up on a user's feed. Impressions alone can help companies understand the potential that their content has to generate more brand awareness and visibility for the company, however, it's important that companies look at other metrics at the same time to get a more in-depth understanding of that performance. If a company generates a lot of impressions but has a low engagement rate on a specific post, that means that the post wasn't interesting enough for the target audience to take any action with it after coming across it.
