Once you’ve got your social media plan ready and a team prepared to action it, you want to ensure you monitor and measure the right metrics to see what works, and what doesn’t.

Much of the early days of getting present on social media is a game of trial and error, especially if you’re a new brand to the market who are still refining their voice and understanding exactly what your audience want to see and hear from you. Throw in the need to be original into the mix, and it can be a challenge.

By streamlining the way you monitor and measure your social metrics, you’ll stay informed with to-the-minute data, and importantly, be able to act on trends you see evolving across your content. This means your social media plan stays agile, and you’ve got proof to back up your decisions and strategy moving forward.

Awareness

Simply put, awareness metrics are the eyes on your social media content, and there are a few ways to tell how many people are seeing your brand.

First up, the general reach of your content and how many people have looked at a post – and you can monitor and track average reach across your content and also the reach of specific and individual posts (this is important to monitor closely especially when you’re trying a new format for the first time, for example, an Instagram Reel rather than a static post).

Keep an eye on WHO is watching – for instance, are more followers looking at your posts, or a good blend of people who follow you and don’t yet follow you. It’s a good sign if the social platform is pushing your content out to people who don’t know about you yet as this = growth.

Impressions sit along with reach, as this shows how many times someone has seen your content – for instance, a user might come back to a post a few times. Perhaps it’s a carousel post of cool facts relating to your brand, or a video they just had to see again – these posts that keep drawing users back mean more impressions.

When you measure and monitor your social metrics, a key fact you’ll want to be on top of is your audience growth rate percentage e.g. how many new followers you’ve gained within a certain period. This comes down to your overall volume of followers – as a new brand, a few hundred new followers can boost your overall growth rate a lot, but if you’ve got 800k followers, 10 new ones over a week or two isn’t an impressive percentage.

Engagement

Your engagement metrics are equally as important to measure and monitor as awareness, as they show how your followers or followers-to-be interact with what you’re posting (this means more than just SEEING a post).

First up, your engagement rate is that key percentage of engagements as a percentage of your social audience (this can mean anything from reactions, comments, shares, saves of a post). You’ll need to drill down on the specific audience you want to measure – overall followers? Keep in mind not everyone who engages with content will follow you, so using benchmarks as a percentage of followers can be helpful.

Many brands will ask influencers for their engagement rate benchmarks – it’s often more important to know that your dedicated followers are commenting and truly captured by a post vs just looking and scrolling along.

Of course, there are truly endless ways to measure engagement – your amplification rate is the ratio of the shares per post vs your overall followers. This shows if a post is really getting good circulation, even from one network to another. Video views, virality rate and even video completion rate (especially handy if you often upload to Youtube).

Like all things social media – you can’t do it all and be it all for everyone. Find those key metrics that will be required to show growth and engagement, and track them well, and use one of the many tools out there that support tracking and measuring across platforms, Hootsuite is a great option that can do it all.

Next up, we’ll look at how you set a successful social media budget, and where you should be spending your money in this social media market.