Why Vanity Metrics For Social Media Are Misguiding You

When it comes to social media metrics and campaign tracking, one of the errors you can make is to focus on vanity metrics in social media, such as page views, followers, likes, or the number of downloads.

On the contrary, meaningful metrics are data points that tie to specific tasks you can improve towards business goals. Simply said, these metrics tell you where the real opportunities for growth are. Social metrics turn into “vanity” metrics when you use them to toot your business horn instead of connecting social media back to real business objectives!

So, do not play the endless game of tracking vanity metrics, that won't convert, over measurable ones that will in long term benefit your business. Through this article, you can shift from how you look online to what matters online.

Meaningful Social Media Metrics

Every business is unique, and every website asks various things of its visitors, so you will need to identify metrics that best fit your business needs! Once you have a solid plan in place about your social media platform, take a look at measurable and strategic metrics, instead of vanity metrics, that you should consider tracking for your business social media needs.

Social Media Reach And Brand Awareness

Reach and Brand Awareness, top-funnel metrics, measure how many people your brand and content are getting in front of during a set of time. A broad reach indicates the impact your website and social media presence have on your ability to attract potential customers! If you can build a recognizable, well-respected, and influential brand, you have done 75 percent of your work.

How To Measure:

To track this social media metric, look at your: Follower Growth, Individual Post Reach, and Campaign Reach Audience Growth. You can access reach metrics and many others by going to your settings tab and going to “Insights.” From there, go down to your “REACH” section and see your results!

Social Media Engagement

Engagement social media metrics are comments, shares, likes, clicks, and saves (all actionable items). The social media engagement rate will tell you how interested your audience is and what type of content resonates with your followers.

Each social media platform where you’re running ads or sharing content should show you the ad/post’s engagement rate. Run and test multiple content pieces so that you can achieve a typical engagement rate for your pages.

Social Media Audience Growth/Rate of Followers

Social media audience growth is a social media metric that shows you the number of followers you have gained over a certain amount of time.
It’s significant to pay attention to the rate at which you’re obtaining followers. If you’re losing followers, you should review what has been shared or posted recently.

How to Measure:

Monitor your audience on each social network and measure the increase in those numbers every week or month to determine the speed at which you’re attracting new fans.

Social Media Fan-Base

Social Media Fan-Base describes how many people share your content and the quantity of “buzz” your business has online. Usual metrics of measuring a loyal fan base on social media can include photos tagged of your Business, branded hashtags used, Instagram and Facebook Stories that Hashtag you, etc.

How to Measure:

That will generally be a quantitative data point you will collect but doing some social media listening will fundamentally benefit your business, too. You need to pay attention to what people are saying, how they are using your branded hashtag(s), and other viral/shareable posts. Different tracking tools such as Facebook and Instagram insights or Google Analytics may help you monitor these significant metrics on your social media.

Starting from now, pay attention to the metrics that are important and from which you can drive results for your business. Vanity Metrics for social media might look easy to interpret and attractive in graphs but they are not the correct analysis of your business.

If you need more help in understanding how to increase the performance of your social media account then contact us here.