For brands, social media is not free. That might be hard to hear, but it’s true! The platform is free and you may organically grow your audience, but ensuring your audience sees your content is another story.

So, if you’re allocating a portion of your marketing budget to social media, you’re going to want to track how your posts are performing. We live in a fast-paced, digital environment where a strategy you use one week on social needs to completely change the next week, and social media analytics are the best way to track your successes and failures. Evaluative data is the key to optimizing your social media performance because anything that can be measured can be managed and improved.

If you’re completely lost when it comes looking at your business’s social media analytics, don’t fret! I’ve broken down a few of the key metrics businesses should track to understand their social performance.

Reach versus impressions

Reach is the number of people who see a post, while impressions are the number of times an ad was seen. For example, if an ad were shown to the same person twice, it would count as one reach and two impressions.

Engagement

Engagement is any like, retweet, share, comment, follow, link click, etc. Post engagement tells you that your audience is interested enough in your brand to interact with your content. Link clicks show that your audience has a desire to learn more.

Conversions

This is the most important metric when businesses want to measure ROI (return on investment). Whether it’s a form-fill, a signup or an e-commerce buy, the conversion objective encourages people interested in your business to purchase or use your product or service. For example, through our social media efforts with one of our clients, Sky Zone Franklin, we’re able to track exactly how many ticket sales result from a Facebook post. This is done by setting up a pixel code. By using the pixel to track the journey from the Facebook sponsored post all the way to the purchase screen on their site, we can track people’s digital paths.

Button clicks

On Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram ads, there is often a call-to-action button, like “Contact Us,” “Learn More,” “Buy Now,” etc. These analytics are great to have because they show the most direct intent.