What’s not to like? How to measure social media engagement

(Posted on 04/08/21)

With a sound social media strategy in place, and plenty of good and relevant content being shared across your brand’s social accounts, that’s job done, right? 

Wrong. It’s not enough to just post content and hope for the best, there are ways in which you can determine the success of your content, to help influence your ongoing posting strategy. 

Here at Zebra, we use detailed analytics to provide reflective reports on what has worked well, and what hasn’t been as effective, to measure social media success for our clients. This can be determined through how your audience engages with your content through one or, ideally, a combination of the following:

 

Views

Views are also referred to in social media analytics as ‘impressions’. This is given as the number of times a person will have either seen the post in their feed, clicked on it to view more of the post, or interacted with it in some way.

Even if the person hasn’t engaged with the post through a like or comment, impressions are ideal for measuring how posts are building your brand awareness. However, you can make sure that your posts are being seen by the right people, by following the right people. By following and engaging with other relevant accounts, you increase your chance of creating engagements, not just impressions, with your audience.

 

Likes

Each social media profile offers a way for social users to show their appreciation for a post with a ‘like’. Twitter and Instagram provide a simple like option through clicking the ‘heart’ on posts. Facebook and LinkedIn, however, have allowed social users to express themselves further on its like options with ‘reactions’. Facebook provides fun emojis like a wow face, or a laughing face for users to convey their emotions to a post more. However, LinkedIn is a bit more ‘grown up’, to reflect the more professional nature of the platform. It provides likes options to a post such as ‘Insightful’ or ‘Curious’, or the opportunity for users to ‘Celebrate’ it.

By the number of likes a post generates, the immediate success of it with the audience can be determined, and further posts of its style can be shared in the future.

 

Comments

Further to a ‘like’, comments can provide a real insight to what a social user thinks of a post. These are sometimes harder to attain, as they are more time consuming for the user than just liking or reacting to a post. Either positive or negative, people taking the time to leave a comment and their thoughts on your post; either on the topic or the nature of the content, shows a more in depth engagement level with your brand.

 

Shares

People use social for different reasons. They may be on there to gain knowledge or, more often than not, they use social media as a way to be entertained, and also to inspire others. When a post is shared by a user, it clearly shows that they have had an emotional reaction to it. They are then motivated to pass on the same experience they’ve had and ‘share’ it with others. This is especially true when a post resonates with someone, such as for its funny, shocking or intriguing content. This sharing with their network can help to raise awareness of your brand with a wider audience, creating even more engaged followers with your future posts.

 

Referrals

Providing a link directly in your post to your website, either to your services or online store, is the perfect way to secure traffic and conversions. It will direct people to find out more of what you do and can provide for them, as well as give them the opportunity to discover more of your interesting and valuable content on your blog.

By reviewing which of your website’s pages have gained the most referrals, ie. visitors from social media, this can determine your most popular pages and blogs, which can then help to feed into your web article strategy. By also seeing which posts drove the most traffic to your website pages, these best performing posts can then be replicated to ensure that your social followers keep coming back for more.

Engagements through likes and comments are not just imperative for knowing what to continue sharing or not on your business’ social profiles. Social media platforms actively promote posts in people’s feeds if they have received higher levels of engagements over others.

So, the more engagements your posts receive, the more likely a platform’s algorithms will pick it up and share it to a wider audience. This increases your chance of building and engaging with a wider and dedicated network of followers and brand converts.

 

Speak to our team to see how we can help your social accounts to stand out from the crowd.