How to Accurately Measure Social Media Engagement | Orlando Digital Marketing Blog

Accurately measuring social media engagement is crucial because you need to know if your message or content is resonating with your audience. There’s little benefit to having thousands of followers if they ignore your posts – it’s better to have an engaged small audience than vice versa.

Additionally, engagement affects how many people will even see your post because social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter see engagement as a sign of quality and popularity.

See how to accurately measure social media engagement so you can get a clear picture of your efforts and make improvements.

Also called ‘key performance indicators’ (KPI) in digital marketing, metrics are an important element in any social media strategy because without tracking your efforts, you won’t know which messages or pieces of content resonate with your audience.

Here are eight engagement metrics that will help you better understand social media analytics and leverage the data to increase your ROI.

Link clicks show a level of interest but it’s not a good indicator of engagement on its own. If your post receives a lot of link clicks but few likes, shares, and comments, it can mean that the post did well in getting viewers’ attention but the content wasn’t strong enough to get them to interact with it further.

However, high overall engagement with low link clicks means you need to fix how you pitch the content by changing the copy or visuals to increase traffic.

Social media platforms use likes as a signal for giving your post visibility in users’ newsfeeds. Also, likes attract more likes because people gravitate towards popular posts.

Shares are a more active form of engagement than likes because when users share your post, they are giving a personal recommendation to their followers. A high number of shares is a sign that your content is great.

When you’re able to create a conversation on your posts, it shows that users find your content interesting enough to talk about. Even negative comments can be useful for identifying customer pain points that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise get if users were silent.

An engagement rate measures the level of engagement (e.g. comments, shares, and likes) that a piece of content is receiving from followers. It’s calculated as total engagement divided by total followers, multiplied by 100.

An engagement rate example for a Facebook post:

100 comments + 500 shares + 1,000 likes = 1,600 engagements

(1,600 engagements / 50,000 followers) x 100 = 3.2% engagement rate

Brand mentions are when your brand’s account is tagged in a post or comment. When people are talking about your brand on social media, it shows that your brand is staying relevant in the conversation and possibly reaching new audiences.

Having followers isn’t enough if they don’t interact with your brand which is why you should strive to increase the number of active followers. These are generally considered to be followers who have interacted with your content within the past 30 days.

This metric isn’t always provided in social media analytics but it’s worthwhile to know if you can. Knowing the number of profile visits is helpful because it shows a higher level of interest in your brand beyond the latest post.

Without engagement, social media marketing falls flat. Constantly posting without evaluating engagement metrics is a waste of time and won’t generate much of an ROI. Instead, focus on building a community around your business through messages and content that resonate with your audience.

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