Social media engagement is a key KPI to be measuring. It measures the number of likes, comments, shares, clicks and mentions that you are receiving across your social channels. The metric provides insight into whether your content is relevant for your audience and helps you recognise who is interested in your business. Evaluating your engagement is also a crucial way to help you improve your other social media KPIs, such as reach, conversion, retention and loyalty.
We recently covered why you should track reach KPIs in our post ‘Breaking Down the Reach KPI: The 4 Elements Your B2B Business Should Be Tracking.’ Both reach and engagement work well side by side in measuring the success of your content. However, if your B2B business is seeing a large reach, you might still be receiving low engagement. This could be due to not having a consistent brand message or posting content that doesn’t resonate with your target audience.
No matter the size of your audience, if they are engaged, it can help you grow organically and generate more leads that could eventually turn into customers.
We’ve put together the four elements of engagement KPIs your business should be tracking to evaluate the success of your content.
Likes
If you’re tailoring your content to your audience, this metric will be the first you will look at to see whether you are generating the right attention for your business. The goal is to nurture an engaged community, so by measuring your likes you can pinpoint what kind of posts your audience like or don’t like. The more likes one of your posts has, the higher engagement you will be receiving. To increase your engagement, you should be consistently producing posts that are similar in topic to the ones that get the highest likes.
Comments
You want to be engaging with your audience with every chance you get, so comments are a key element in creating conversations with your customers. Comments can also help build a sense of community across your social channels, creating more opportunity for new audience members to be intrigued by who you are. To create and continue conversations with your audience, your content should be relevant, interesting and informative. Even with critical comments, your business can still learn from this and tweak your content next time accordingly.
Shares
Whilst likes help to show what content your audience enjoys and comments build your community, both aren’t huge indicators of loyalty. This is where shares come in. If you are receiving shares from your audience, it means they are willing to recommend what you do to their community. It allows you to realise that you are producing high-quality content that is worth talking about. Tracking your posts that get the most shares will allow you to understand what sorts of content to produce in future.
Clicks
To understand whether your social media is attracting the right audience that will eventually convert to customers, you should be measuring clicks. Evaluating how many clicks per post that you receive helps you estimate the amount of website traffic you are gaining from your social media efforts. Even if your post is not sharing a specific piece of content, you can increase clicks by including a link to a related page on your site that would be helpful for your followers, for example, your contact page.
Mentions
Mentions identify who is talking about your business. By measuring this metric, you can figure out whether the people engaging with your content are good to target in terms of converting to customers. If you aren’t gaining the amount of noise you are expecting on social media or the person mentioning you isn’t relevant to your brand, maybe it’s time to evaluate and tweak your messaging. The more mentions of your business there are on social media, the higher the awareness of your brand is going to be, potentially leading to more sales.
For businesses that have an online presence, high social engagement is a sign that your brand is making an impact within the industry. However, social media engagement isn’t just about the numbers of likes, comments, share or mentions. It’s about building long-term relationships with your followers and raising a positive awareness around your brand. If you are providing content that is both relevant and serves a purpose for your audience, you should start to see your social media and overall brand thrive.
At Ilex, our expert team can help you increase your brand awareness and build long-lasting relationships through a strategic social media strategy that focuses on your goals, improving overall performance, and defining a brand message that is relayed across all social media channels.