How To Measure Social Media Engagement

Social media is a great tool for marketing your business, but it does require time and effort to use it well. So how do you know which of your social media efforts benefit you the most? Start by understanding and tracking the right metrics.

Social media engagement measures your followers’ interest in your brand on social media. In short, it’s an assessment of the individual social interactions between your company and audience (e.g., likes, follows, and retweets).

This article explains how to measure social media engagement and identify the essential metrics you should track to help refine your social media strategy.

• Understanding engagement
• Essential engagement metrics
• How to track engagement metrics

Understanding engagement

Engagement is a broad term for consumer interaction with your social media posts. Those interactions typically include likes, shares, and comments, among other actions we’ll discuss below. Effectively, engagement is the combination of all these actions on your social media accounts. Some business owners are already familiar with website engagement metrics, like page views or bounce rates. Social media platforms now offer even better reporting so you can make better data-driven decisions.

As with any advertising, the more potential customers interact with your brand on social media, the better your brand awareness. Increasing the number of followers you have on social media can also improve the perception of your popularity. Brand recognition and popularity can help you retain loyal customers. Loyal customers can offer repeat business and will continue to extend your reach when they share your message with their connections, creating a positive growth spiral for your business.

The effectiveness of your social media campaigns can have a direct impact on your bottom line. Over 50% of the world’s population is on social media on a regular basis, and there’s a decline in time spent with traditional media like television (see chart below). Your business is missing a significant opportunity to grow your share of voice and expand your opportunities to grow your revenue if you can’t find a way to increase your social media engagement.

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The importance of tracking engagement on social media

By now, most small business owners understand the value of social media. In fact, more than 50 million small business owners use Facebook pages to promote their businesses. However, many small business owners fail to actively track social media engagement.

Tracking engagement in social media campaigns is critical for your overall marketing strategy. You may think you have a strong gut instinct about how well your social media marketing is working for you, and you may be right. However, failing to track the right social media performance metrics makes you blind to potential problems (like loss of followers) and potential opportunities (like effective inbound content ideas).

So, what are the important metrics from the top social media platforms to measure the connection you have on your social networks?

Essential engagement metrics

Overall, your main social media goal is likely to be increasing engagement with your customers on your social media accounts. The measurable engagement actions typically consist of click-throughs, shares, comments, and reactions. But each platform has variations—like a share on Facebook vs. a retweet on Twitter.

In general, the more these engagements happen, the better your brand is doing. The caveat is that unhappy customers may take these actions, too. Either way, you’ll likely find value in tracking and understanding all social media metrics.

To put engagements into context, you’ll want to calculate your engagement rate rather than the raw number of clicks, shares, etc. The number of engagements alone won’t give you the full picture. Let’s say a larger company has a post with 5,000 likes while your post has only 100. As a percentage of your followers, your social media content may actually be performing better with your audience. Engagement rate provides better insight into the performance of your content.

To calculate the engagement rate, take the total number of engagements (number of likes, comments, etc.) on a post, divide it by the total number of post views (impressions), and multiply that number by 100.

Let’s say a LinkedIn or Facebook post has 1,000 views, 50 likes, and 50 comments (or 100 total engagements). You’d have a 10% engagement rate.

Or 100/1,000 = 0.10 x 100 = 10%

You can also calculate engagement using your follower numbers rather than impressions. This will be useful when your post is limited to followers and is not a part of a broader marketing campaign. To use this method, replace impressions with your number of followers and use the same calcluation.  

Using the same details as the example, your LinkedIn or Facebook post gets 50 likes and 50 comments (100 total engagements) and divide it by the total number of followers rather than total views.

Track these metrics using an analytics tool like Google Analytics. You’ll also want to ensure that your analytics tool is correctly connected with social platforms (like Meta Pixel) to ensure accuracy.

In addition to the engagement rate, consider a few more of the most important engagement metrics to track for your business.

Conversion rate

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The conversion rate typically refers to a product purchase on your website, but it can also be related to other goals (like a qualified sales lead). A social media conversion is one where a visitor came from one of your social channels to your website, and that visit directly resulted in a sale.

Let’s say your goal is to increase conversions from your social media campaigns and you want to track your success. Set a clear goal, like a 10% increase in social media conversions over a 30-day period.

From there, create your campaign and all types of content (ads, graphics, landing page, messaging) for distribution on your social channels. Once you’ve implemented your campaign, follow the associated content and performance to see if your conversions improved by 10%. If not, triage your campaign to determine what worked and what didn’t and adjust for the next campaign.

Engagement

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We’ve talked about engagement tracking as a general metric, but let’s get into specific engagements you can track on each social media platform.

While having a very large following on a social media platform does a lot for you, it’s the interactivity that you achieve from your followers that helps you understand how well your content is performing. That’s why the engagement rate (mentioned above) is calculated as a ratio of followers and engagements. But what engagements can you encourage with social media marketing campaigns?

Here’s a quick rundown of a few of the top social networks and possible engagements to measure:

• Facebook. Post comments, reactions, shares, click-throughs, photo views
• Instagram. Shares, likes, comments, direct messages (DMs), and saves
• Twitter. Likes, comments, retweets
• LinkedIn. Likes, comments, shares, click-throughs
• YouTube. Likes (thumbs up), dislikes (thumbs down), comments, shares

Networks add new functions all the time, like Faceook’s Covid “care” reaction emoji or “pride” rainbow. More recently, LinkedIn added “laughing”—be sure to laugh professionally! They can omit options, like removing the pride emoji after pride month and account for negative reactions (angry or sad), comments, and DMs, as well. If you track individual reactions be sure to account for these changes in your metrics.

You can also get website click-throughs from your profile, sales, and other metrics from third-party integrations.

Impressions

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Impressions are the total number of times your ad was presented to a social media platform’s audience. Tracking impressions will help you make informed decisions about social media advertising budgets.

You can also track impressions on standard posts to get an idea of your general post reach. Generally speaking, the more interactions (shares, likes, etc.) your brand receives, the more impressions your content will receive. Growing impression levels tend to indicate that your content is generating interest.

Impression data is not measured exactly the same way across all social media platforms, and some properties will also offer impression data only for paid ads. However, you can standardize on a method for a given platform and—as long as you remain consistent—track and compare the changes.

Customer satisfaction

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Obviously, customer satisfaction is important to your brand’s longevity. But what kind of metrics can you use to determine if your customer is truly satisfied? The best way to determine customer satisfaction is with a simple survey.

To determine how your followers feel about your specific social channels, create a simple one- or two-question survey asking how satisfied they are with your brand (or Facebook page) and share a trackable link referencing the channel. You can share your survey link in a post or another location on your page.

Audience growth rate

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The number of people following your social media over time is another data point to track. An increase or decrease in follower count is an indication of the level of interest your audience has in the content you are producing.

You can track the data over a specific time—like for a specific season or marketing campaign—and keep it as a monthly or weekly measure for your KPIs.

To measure the growth rate, you simply divide new followers by your total followers and express it as a percentage. For example, if you had 10,000 Facebook followers on January 1 and 11,000 followers on March 31, your follower growth rate for the quarter would be 10%.

Growth Rate = new total followers / original total followers x 100= growth rate %

How to track engagement metrics

Social media engagement tracking is a bit easier with the help of a social media tracking app or web-based tool. You’ll find many to choose from with some including more features (like content scheduling).

Tools like Sprout Social or Agency Analytics (designed for marketing agencies) connect to your social media platforms and give you the ability to run reports for all platforms. You can also create a scannable dashboard to help you better understand your social media analytics.

You must provide login details for each social property to create your dashboard. You’ll want to be sure that the profiles connected to them have the necessary access level to view reporting. Once you’ve connected all of your profiles, you can sort through the available data and set up your dashboard to include the metrics we’ve just discussed. ‍

Track social media engagement with expert help

Now that you know the right metrics to track and have an idea of the tools that can help monitor your campaigns, you’re ready to start measuring your social media engagement and fine-tuning your social media content strategy.

Are you looking for a little help with your social media management? Consider finding an independent social media professional using Upwork, the world’s leading talent network. If you’re an independent social media expert, set up your Upwork profile and easily connect with businesses that need your expertise.

Upwork is not affiliated with and does not sponsor or endorse any of the tools or services discussed in this article. These tools and services are provided only as potential options, and each reader and company should take the time needed to adequately analyze and determine the tools or services that would best fit their specific needs and situation.

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