How to Measure Social Media Engagement
Glory-Anna Oshafi
Between 2021 and 2022, the number of social media users worldwide went up 10%. This increase means there are now over 370 million new users of social media, and your clients and customers could be a part of them. Experts believe that there will be over 4.4 billion social network users in the world in the next five years.
These statistics might seem overwhelming, but every proactive marketer is already strategizing how they can convert these social media users to quality leads. The first and most important step to achieving this is to evaluate your social media metrics to determine just how people are interacting with your content on social media.
In this article, we will take a deep dive into how to measure your engagement on social media, essential metrics every social media campaign should look out for, and a tool that can help in the process.
What Is Social Media Engagement?
Social media engagement means just what it sounds like— a measurement of how your audience engages or interacts with your social media accounts and whatever content you put out on social media.
Social media engagement covers diverse types of actions and activities of your audience that show they are interested in your content or find it relevant or relatable. It is also an effective way to learn how to improve your connection with them.
Measuring social media engagement helps you successfully determine:
- What works in your social media campaign
- What needs to be scrapped
- What you need to start doing
- What you can do better
How Do You Measure Engagement on Social Media?
Social media engagement exists in various ways, depending on the platform.
On Instagram, for instance, likes, shares, comments, replies, views, reposts, saves, and direct messages are some of the ways your audience interacts with your posts. On Twitter, on the other hand, your audience may engage with your content through tweets, retweets, replies, mentions, and likes.
Although different social networks may coin various names for the types of activities that take place on their platforms, they all share some common engagement metrics.
Most social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram make it easy for marketers to track their audience engagement. They have dashboards that provide a detailed data analysis of what goes down on your content whenever you post a video, photo, tweet, etc. You can also use helpful tools like Iconosquare to monitor all your social media analytics on a single dashboard.
5 Important Social Media Metrics You Should Track
Here are five important metrics to look out for on your social media analytics dashboard and how to interpret the information you find:
Conversational Rate Metrics
Comments fall under the conversational rate metrics. Putting out content on social media and recording little to no comments shows that your audience does not find your content engaging enough.
The average number of comments on your posts shows how conversational your content is. If there are hardly any comments on your posts, it should tell you that your content does not spark interest or trigger conversations. Comments on your post also help to boost your reach.
Keep track of followers who interact with your post the most. These are called active fans, and they often help to trigger conversations on your posts. When they comment, retweet, mention or talk about your business on social media, interact with them frequently because it may encourage non-active fans to join in the conversation.
Applause Rates
The applause rate per post is also a valuable metric to track. Most social networks provide the Like option for followers to interact with your page positively. Sometimes, followers don’t have time or don’t want to leave a comment, so the Like button helps them express their interest in your content.
Monitor the number of likes your posts get and who likes your posts to see the category of people and demographic that find them relevant or useful. It gives you an idea of the types of content your followers like to see so that you can put up more of such.
Shares, retweets, and reposts are also an indication that your audience finds your content useful or they know people who will. It also suggests that the content within the post is worth resharing, so you may want to create more of such content. Shares also help improve your reach.
Audience Growth Rate
All social media platforms have some sort of audience base —Facebook Friends, Instagram. TikTok & Twitter Followers, YouTube Subscribers, and so on.
Take note of how many new followers you gain over a period, say weekly or monthly. This statistic should give you an idea of how many people know you on the social media platform and if you need to improve your brand awareness strategies.
A slow or inconsistent followership growth indicates that you need to improve the quality of your content or the frequency of your posting schedule.
If you’re losing followers, you need to reevaluate your content to find what may be a turn-off for your audience and what may likely make them stay. It’s also vital that you keep an eye on your number of followers versus the number of people you follow.
A very low number of followers compared to the people you follow may portray your brand as desperate or too eager, which may scare off followers. These metrics should averagely be in the same range.
Clicks, Views, and Saves
One way to find out how attention-grabbing your post is is by checking the number of clicks it gets. If it’s a video post, check how many views it gets. If a post grabs attention, your audience will at least watch it for a few minutes.
To see if they find it interesting, look out for the average duration of watch time. How long your audience spends watching the video tells you how much it grabbed their attention. Some members of your audience may take it a step further to save the post for later so that they can watch it again or at a more convenient time.
These metrics are pointers to how your brand message aligns with your audience or following. If you have a high number of views, clicks, and saves, it shows that your audience is receiving your brand message well and that they find it relevant or useful.
Essentially, it shows that they’re getting what they came for when they chose to follow or engage with your content.
Follower Demographics
Demographics refers to a variety of personal information about your followership or audience. Tracking follower demographics helps you determine if your content reach is aligned with your brand’s target audience.
Demographics include age, gender, location, interests, and much more. So, for instance, if your brand’s target audience is young adult females in college, but the majority of your followership consists of middle-aged working-class women, you know that you need to create more content that is relatable to the audience you want to attract.
Demographics are also important because you can find out what your audiences’ interests are so that you can modify your brand’s message to give them what they want. This is a more effective way to generate quality leads that convert.
How Juphy Helps You Manage Social Media Engagement
Knowing what to look out for when you measure your social media engagement is one thing; having the right tool to give you accurate information is another. Working with the right tools makes the process less burdensome and undeniably quicker.
Juphy is the game-changing social media engagement tool that helps small businesses manage all their social media in one place. With so many social media platforms to engage with customers and clients, keeping up with emails, DMs, reviews, and more can become quite overwhelming.
Juphy provides teams with a unified inbox where you can access all your social media messages in one place. It’s the perfect tool for teams that handle customer communication because your customer support processes become better streamlined.
You no longer have to switch between different apps to attend to mentions, customer requests, reviews, or comments since you can do all this from your Juphy dashboard. Juphy has the Custom Reports feature that provides teams with a detailed analysis of their social media engagement rate to manage your customer engagement metrics.
You can find charts detailing the total number of messages your team responded to, average response time to audience engagement, how your audience engages with your posts, and which of your social media channels perform highly. And these charts help you improve your social media strategy.
With this tool, your audience engagement no longer has to be one-sided; you can also join in the conversation. Start managing your social media engagement with this free 7-day trial.
Final Thoughts
Measuring your social media engagement rates helps you establish whether or not you’re on the right track with your social media strategy and if you’re meeting your social media goals. It also gives you an insight into the types of content that gets your audience engaged so that you can create more of what they want.
This blog post shares metrics to track to help you measure how well your content is doing. It also highlights one of the best social media engagement tools, Juphy, to get the most out of your engagement.
Social media engagement means just what it sounds like—a measurement of how your audience engages or interacts with your social media accounts and whatever content you put out on social media.
Although different social networks may coin various names for the types of activities that take place on their platforms, they all share some common engagement metrics, like the number of likes, shares, comments, replies, views, reposts, saves, and direct messages.
1. Conversational Rate Metrics
2. Applause Rates
3. Audience Growth Rate
4. Clicks, Views, and Saves
5. Follower Demographics
Juphy is a game-changing social media engagement tool that helps small businesses manage all their social media in one place. With so many social media platforms to engage with customers and clients, keeping up with emails, DMs, reviews, and more can become quite overwhelming, but luckily, Juphy is here to help.
Related Article
Social media community management focuses on the conversation and steering the target audience’s perspective towards the desired outcome. Read to learn more.