There is only one way to make your social media marketing campaign successful. You need to keep track of the feedback that comes from your readers and customers. Their input shouldn’t be your only guide, but it should influence the creative decisions behind your campaigns.

Luckily social media itself can provide you with the data you need to understand your audience. The amount of data you can get can sometimes be overwhelming and you need to know what metrics are truly important and informative. It’s about figuring out how your content fits in the lives of your readers and how it makes them better.

6 Social Media Metrics Your Business Needs to Track

1. Mentions

Mentions are used to figure out how many people are talking about your brand and, more importantly, who is talking about it. All mentions are important, but you should especially focus on ones mentioning your company in a positive manner.

It’s also a good idea to take a look at the mentions of your competitors as well. The thing you want to measure isn’t just who is mentioned more, but also which brand is promoting actual online conversations and discussions.

2. Influencers

Social media is its own ecosystem of information and the influencers have a special role in it. They are not always famous and important outside of social media, but online they wield a lot of power. That’s why it’s become so commonplace to use their services to promote your brand.

It isn’t enough to find someone with a lot of followers or subscribers. You should use the data available online to figure out who their followers are and what kind of community are they promoting in. This isn’t always easy to pick up so you need to understand how the community you’re evaluating actually works.

3. Conversions

The whole point of a marketing campaign is to bring people to your store and to actually drive up your sales and conversions. There are more subtle campaigns you can use to reposition your brand within the industry, but these only work if you already have the conversions you need.

This is a fairly simple thing to track; you’re looking for the sheer number of conversions that happened within a month or a week. Then you should match the data with the particular content you’ve created in order to understand what your readers are looking for.

Reach refers to the audience outside of your circle of followers that you can reach and get interested in your business. This is one of the most important metrics you can follow because it tells you how fast your business is growing. This is crucial because if a company isn’t expanding it won’t be able to compete within the industry.

What you want to be on the lookout for isn’t just the rising number of followers but where those followers come from and how they heard about your company because that will tell you where your key demographic is.

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4. Engagement

Social media are an endless stream of information and that can sometimes be overwhelming. Just having someone as a follower or a subscriber isn’t enough; it doesn’t tell you anything about how your brand is influencing that person. What you’re really looking for is engagement.

You want to have a clear idea of what kind of posts your audience notices and what posts are causing discussion and conversation. It’s also important to note which followers and subscribers are the most active in the community and in what ways. You should reward those who help out by driving the conversation as well.

5. Attitude Toward Your Brand

All the followers and all the engagement don’t mean much if the attitude they have toward your brand is negative or combative. You need to keep track of the quality of the engagement and the amount of praise you’re getting online. A lot of it can be accomplished by having a great social media team and choosing only the best employees to work in customer service.

It’s also important to have in mind that the attitude toward your brand online isn’t an attitude toward your business, just its representation on social media. Don’t feel discouraged if there are problems in this area, you can fix it without overhauling the whole business.

Keeping track of these metrics will allow you to understand your customers better. That way you can improve your social media strategy and make it more user-friendly.