Speaker 1: If you're overwhelmed by all the social media metrics out there and just want to know what to focus on, let's remove the overwhelm. Let's make this simple and just focus on the most important metrics to master your social media. It starts right now. Hey, I'm Brooke Miles and I'm a social media strategist in Delaware. And no matter where you live, I'm here to help you create a social media program that's easy to run, that gets results, and that you can feel proud of. You deserve it. Now for analytics. I don't know about you, but to me reviewing social media analytics is like going to the doctor for an annual checkup. I know I need to do it, but I'm afraid if I go, I'm going to get some surprising bad news. So I'd rather just not. But whether it's for our health or our social media, we have to do regular checkups so we know what's going well and what's not going well so we can fix it and improve things and get better results. Here are the most important metrics to focus on. And the first one is growth rate. Now you can already see the number of followers you have. Let's say you have about a thousand ish followers on your Facebook page, but what do you do with that number? What's better is to track your growth rate, especially as it compares to your competitors. Let's say again, you have a thousand followers and your top competitor has 2000 followers. You might say, Oh no, they have a way stronger brand. So to numb the pain you now feel in your heart, you wolf down an entire pint of Ben and Jerry's. But if you look at growth rate, it tells a whole different story. Let's say in the last six months you brought on 300 new followers and your competitor only brought in 80. So who's getting noticed more? You are. So now instead of binging on Ben and Jerry's in sorrow, you can binge on Ben and Jerry's to celebrate. The next thing you want to look at are reach and impressions. And a lot of people confuse reach and impressions. So let me clarify this all. Reach is the number of people who see your posts. In other words, the number of people reached. Impressions on the other hand, measures how many times your posts are seen. And one person can see one of your posts more than once. Maybe they scroll up the page and down the page. Every time it crosses their eyeballs, it's an impression. To simplify things, let's focus more on reach than impressions because we have better control of how many people see our posts versus how many times they scroll up and down at a post scroll. Okay, let me try this again. It's hard to control how many times the post crosses someone's eyeballs. So what sort of reach should you shoot for in your organic posts? In other words, the normal posts that are free that you're not doing paid advertising on. Typically an organic post will reach only a teeny, teeny, tiny percentage of your followers. And I'm talking like less than 5%. Every social media site is different. The algorithms are always changing, but I'm telling you this because let's say you put a post out there and it reaches 45 people and you have a thousand followers. That's a 4.5% reach rate. And again, that's about normal. And frankly, that's why a lot of people do paid advertising. But if your reach is consistently way, way, way lower than that, let me give you some tips on how to change that. Because it's one thing to get the numbers and say, wow, my reach is low. It's another thing to obviously take action on it. The first thing you can do is humanize your content with real stories about people in your organization or stories about the lives you touch with your products and services. And you might wonder, how in the world does that help my post get delivered to more people? It's because humanized content tends to get more engagement. In other words, you get more likes, comments, shares. And when you have more engagement, your social media sites will say, that post is pretty interesting. I think we'll send it to more newsfeeds. The other thing you can do to improve reach is to make sure you're not consistently self-promotional, like always trying to sell something. And constant selling doesn't encourage as much engagement. Now I could go on and on and all the things you could do to improve your posts to get more engagement, but I've actually created a video all about that. So stick to the end. I'll provide the link. And how appropriate is this? The next thing to look for is engagement rate that compares how many people are engaging to how many people saw the post. In other words, what are the chances that when they see your post, they'll interact with it. This really helps you gauge how interesting your posts are. So what sort of engagement rate should you shoot for? The number does vary by industry. It varies by the social media site, but in general engagement rates are less than 1%. So let's say your post was delivered to a thousand people and 20 people engaged with the post. That is a 2% engagement rate. Good job. It might not feel like it's good, but it is. Celebrate with that pint of Ben and Jerry's. In general, if your engagement rate is really, really, really low, then consider the tips I provided earlier in this video and certainly check out the video that I'll share at the very end. You also want to look at click through rate, also called CTR. This is especially helpful if you're trying to understand your success in driving people to your website or to a specific landing page so they can take the action you want them to take. In general, it's calculated by dividing the number of people who click on a link by the number of people who saw the post. And just like engagement rate, click through rates do vary by industry and social media sites. In general, a one to 2% click through rate is considered about average. So if you have a CTR of more than 2%, good job. If your CTR is consistently less than 1%, take an honest look at your posts. Are they catchy? Do they compel people to action? For instance, you should be using imagery that's clear, that pops. Your caption that you write should not only point out your customer's pain, but share how you solve it. And you should have a clear and compelling call to action. It's also helpful to look at your conversion rate. And the most common example is if you're doing paid advertising. The difference between click through rate and conversion rate is that click through rate just says how many people clicked over to the landing page you want. Conversion rate says, okay, great. They're at the landing page. How many of those people took the action you wanted them to take? For example, they've downloaded the ebook, registered for the event, or bought the product. This measures the success of your ad so much more. To measure this, you can use the Facebook pixel or the LinkedIn insight tag. And this is free code that's offered by the social media sites that you put on the back end of your website. Although I will tell you when I got the code, I was too scared to put on my website. I just gave it to my web developer because I was afraid I was going to just like make my website explode. I struggle with lots of fears. Anyway, when the code is put on your website, it'll be able to speak to your social media sites and give you the information you need. Now for the power tip, you might be wondering how often should you be checking your analytics? Because reviewing analytics takes time and it's not the most fun thing to do. So I have good news for you. In general, you can review your analytics every three to six months. You might think that's a really long time, but you need to have enough posts out there to have enough data out there to get meaningful results. And if you were to check your analytics more often, like once a month or once a week, it's like weighing yourself every day. It'll drive you nuts and really not tell you anything. Now, if you're running a paid ad for a finite period of time, I do recommend you check your analytics as the ad is going to make sure it's giving you the results you want, because you can stop an ad at any time if you need to. But overall, whether it's organic or it's paid, you do want good content, right? Check out this video in the top right corner. It shows you how you can get more engagement on your Facebook posts, but really these ideas apply to all your social media. Thanks and see you in the next video.