Engagement, reach, impressions. You likely know these terms well, but what do they mean for marketing professionals? It is important to note that over 4 billion people in the world identify as social media users. That is over half the world’s population! Needles to say, you do not want to miss out on social media and its remarkable reach.
So, how can you use social media insights to grow your business, build stronger relationships with your target audience, and channel your creative efforts into a high return on your investment?
No matter what industry you serve, social media insights are essential tools for understanding your audience, measuring the validity of your campaign strategies, and crafting more effective campaigns in the future. In this article, we will explore these insights more closely.
Why Social Insights Can Make (Or Break) Your Business
Without social media insights, you’re basically working in the dark ages of advertising, hoping to throw something into the void that can lead you to the light. Consumers are more aware of marketing than they have ever been before. It’s not enough to just have a social media account for your business. You have to use it. This is the place where you can speak to your audience directly, and they, in turn, can talk to you. Start tracking the most important social insight metrics to shed light on the conversation you’re having with your users.
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Engagement: A measurement of user interaction with a post (i.e., Likes, reactions, clicks, shares, comments, or @-mentions).
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Impressions and Reach: The number of times posts appear in a user’s timeline and the number of potential people who will see a post.
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Customer Care Analytics: Measures response time and the rate of response for social messages from your business to the consumers.
What Is Social Engagement?
Engagement is an active involvement metric. Put plainly, engagement is defined as any action a user takes with your post. Any clicks, shares, reactions, mentions, or comments fall under this category. Engagement is often the chunk of the story that marketing directors, strategists, and ad professionals care about the most. Engagement tells you to what degree your audience is interested in your content and in what ways they find it interesting (or don’t).
A blog post that is liked but not shared tells you that your audience was engaged by the topic enough to want to read the post but wasn’t interested enough in the content to share it with their friends. Now you know it’s time to take another look at it. Does it answer the user’s question? Does it sound like your brand? Is it offering fun, interesting, or memorable information? Asking these questions based on the metrics can tell you where you lost the user.
Using Social Impressions & Reach
When we talk about impressions, we mean the number of times that a post appears on a person’s timeline. Reach is the potential number of views of a post. Impressions and reach are sometimes organized under one large category called social “awareness.” Regardless of how your company organizes these metrics, they are markers of brand awareness and audience perception. Usually, marketers compare impression and reach with engagement to indicate whether their content is working to influence new customers to take an interest in their brand or product. Marketers also use these metrics to zero in on detailed patterns, such as how many times a user had to see the content before they became interested. This is important info if you want to test a soft launch of a campaign, revise an old one, or try out a new strategy.
Customer Care Metrics Matter
Customer care metrics boil down to response time and response rate. Response time measures how long it takes your team to respond to messages. Response rate is the number of messages your team responds to. These metrics are big fish in the social insights pond in this day and age of instant everything. An unreasonable social response time risks alienating your audience (especially if exceptional customer service is part of your brand) because they think no one cares enough to respond to their messages in a timely manner.
A low response rate means missed opportunities for your marketing team to jump on consumer trends. Social media is a way for your consumers to tell you exactly what they want from your products—someone has to be listening for it to help further your business.
How You Can Implement Social Insights
To recap, social media insights are essential to measuring the success of your marketing strategies over time, understanding your audience, and being on the upswing of consumer trends. If you haven’t already, it’s time to invest in a social analytics program. The program will compile your metrics for each platform, allowing you to crunch the numbers easily and compare between time periods, campaigns, and different kinds of audiences. Make it part of your monthly marketing team meetings and ask the social media manager for daily or weekly reports to keep on top of trends.
Not sure you want to handle the numbers yourself? Contact APS Central to discuss how we can bring the power of social insights to your marketing strategy.
