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Social Media Metrics You Need to Be Tracking

Social media metrics on an iPad Screen.

Social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram love numbers and are raring to give you countless metrics to look through and manage. However, not all those numbers are created equal. Some deserve more of your attention than others, and those should be understood and interpreted in a certain way. This guide will help you find the social media metrics you need to be tracking and pick out the valuable numbers.

Growth Rate

Your follower number is a central number on your accounts and an easy thing to fixate on. Your follower number does provide a broad impression of your audience, but a small or large number doesn’t provide much information for planning your accounts’ content. Furthermore, while some followers are certainly legitimate, other followers could be automated accounts or accounts that haven’t signed in for years. This is why it’s often called a “vanity metric”. 

Instead, how your follow number changes is the metric your need to be tracking. The rate of growth in your followers over certain periods of time is a lot more informative and valuable. This reflects your account’s performance to determine which content and strategies prove effective for growing your audience. These metrics also are more informative about your audience, since they reflect active followers who are more likely to engage with your content. 

Reach

Reach is an insightful metric you need to be tracking and monitoring. This records the number of different individuals who have seen your content. This is different from impressions or views, which track the total amount of times something was seen, including repeats by the same people. Reach more accurately reflects the size of the audience that is viewing your social media content.

Reach will often differ from your follower number. No social media account sees its content reaching all its followers. However, reach does not only measure your followers. It tracks every user who has seen your content, and that includes followers as well as those who may have seen it through hashtags, recommendations by the platform, or through shares from other users. It’s the entire net your social media has cast. 

This is why “reach rate” is not an accurate metric. Reach rate is calculated by dividing the reach of some content by the number of your followers. For example, if you have 400 followers and a post’s reach was 100, that is a reach rate of 25%. However, because reach doesn’t just include your followers, this rate doesn’t really tell you anything. 

Growing your reach is essential to increasing your social media’s audience. Different aspects can affect a post’s reach. The time of posting, the hashtags, key phrases, and the kind of content can all affect how far a post spreads. Keep any of these factors in mind when you’re tracking this metric to determine the most effective strategies for expanding your social media’s reach.

Engagement Rates

Another metric you need to track that tells you more than just how many eyeballs saw your content, is how many people take the effort to “engage” with it. Social media engagement refers to any action that goes beyond viewership. Likes, comments, saves, favorites, shares, and reposts are all forms of engagement that reflect members of your audience going beyond just passive viewership. Engagement provides the insightful metric of not how many people saw it or how often, but how many truly internalized the content to be able to form some kind of response that led to a real action.

Engagement is also important because it’s part of how social media algorithms, including Facebook’s, Instagram’s, and TikTok’s, prioritize content in people’s feeds. Posts with better engagement will populate higher on follower’s feeds and as recommendations. Therefore, engagement rates are not merely a metric you need to track for what is really reaching and speaking to your audience, but also for how to improve that reach.

Saves and Shares 

Saves and shares are a form of engagement that deserve your special attention. Social media services allow users to both “save” or “favorite” posts to their account and share them to others. Both these metrics are also recorded, and you need to track them. Sharing or saving means users were not merely wanting to momentarily engage with a piece of content. Saving indicates they want to come back to it and look at it multiple times, and possible show others. Sharing means someone felt a certain piece of content needed to be shown to someone else. Both are fantastic ways to see what kind of content is engaging and will help you grow a devoted following. 

You Need to Track and Analyze

These are the social media metrics you need to be tracking, but they aren’t entirely straightforward. The numbers never just speak for themselves. There are a lot of factors that can change your account’s growth rate and its contents’ reach and engagement. That’s why you need to interpret the data accordingly. If you are noticing certain trends and want help figuring out how to improve your growth, reach, engagement rates or want to start using some platforms that help manage this data, contact Rosewood’s social media marketing team, who are masters of understanding the metrics you need to be tracking.

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5 Marketing Ideas for Valentine’s Day That Aren’t Cliché

Mother and daughter making valentines day crafts. Marketing ideas for Valentine's

Valentine’s Marketing

Valentine’s Day is a big day for romance and marketing. These are also the two arenas where clichés only lead to eye-rolls instead of undying affection. Romance and marketing need to be inventive and authentic to get attention. Valentine’s Day is one of the first holiday opportunities in the new year for business marketing, but it also means every business is advertising around it. When so many businesses are trying to woo customers, you need to stand out to really charm them. Here are five tips to break away from those eye-rolling Valentine’s clichés and start planning original ideas.

Be Original and Make Your Business Creatively Romantic

Often when people imagine Valentine’s Day, they think of restaurants, candle-lit dinners, and flowers, but romance takes countless forms. Originality is the essence of charm. Imagine how your business can fit into romantic plans or a date, and have your marketing inspire novel romantic actions or gifts. Maybe certain products or Valentine’s packages can make a heartfelt gift or be the basis for a cute date. Have fun with it: new pajamas for a night away, bikes for a couple’s ride on the trails, or a board game for an intimate night at home. Be creative and market to the experiences and emotions of moments your business’ products/services can create. Even a gift card can be made romantic for partners to share a shopping spree date.

Market to their Original Relationships: Friends

Valentine’s is typically for romantic partners, but not everyone will be spending the holiday with their sweetheart. Friends, however, are no less important loved ones in our lives. You can include marketing that inspires shows of affection between friends. Our friends provide valuable emotional support like our partners, and it’s also nice to show them care and appreciation. Galentine’s Day on February 13 has recently become a more notable day for women to shower each other with amicable affection. It’s perfect if your business primarily caters to a feminine demographic. If you are looking for a more gender-inclusive option, you could go for the similarly punny “Pal-entine’s Day”.

Embrace Their Own Valentine

Along with partners and friends, everyone should have and show love and care to themselves. You can market services and products for those who are looking to or should give themselves that much deserved affection this Valentine’s Day. Along with marketing for platonic relationships, this strategy lets you reach customers or clients who may otherwise feel rejected or dejected during the holiday of love. Marketing that emphasizes their individual value and sympathizes with their possible loneliness helps motivate them towards acting on that original self-affection.

Be Their Valentine

Your marketing doesn’t just have to focus on customers and clients showing love to those important in their lives. Your customers and audience are valuable to you and your business, so Valentine’s Day is a great opportunity to show them some of your own love. Be their Valentine with special promotions or discounts. Create social media posts that acknowledge and thank your community. Be sure that those displays of affection or gratitude are authentic and in line with your brand so they feel sincere. Front-facing the human element of your business in this marketing will further ensure those Valentine’s posts create a real connection.

Combining These Together for Something Truly Original

One of these strategies alone will help you create some original Valentine’s marketing for the well-trodden holiday of love. However, using a strategy that only targets romantic partners, friends, or singles will exclude the others. Combining multiple of these strategies will allow you to reach and acknowledge most if not all your community and potential customers. Use multiple strategies together to create a fully original affectionate marketing roster that can pull on everyone’s heartstrings.

Originality is the Essence of Marketing and Romance

With these strategies you can bring some spice to your marketing this Valentine’s Day. Demonstrate how your business can play a vital role in your customers and community showing each other affection along with showing your own. Want more original strategies and ideas? Contact Rosewood’s marketing team for help creating novel and effective marketing.

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Inspiring a Community Through Social Media

An inspiring bookshelf with various books beside a pink chair.

Your follower number is an important metric for determining your brand’s reach, but it means little if that that audience isn’t regularly engaging with your content. That engagement creates a dedicated community around your business. If your content inspires engagement, said community will become invested in supporting, maintaining, and expanding the reach of your brand. That all starts by having a content strategy that inspires and motivates your followers to engage, so here are key tactics of a strategy that builds an inspired community.

Engage and Respond to Your Community

One of your first and best tactics for forming and inspiring your community to engage is by engaging with them. Respond to their comments, posts, and feedback to your content. Be sure to engage with them on your content and theirs. Everyone enjoys some acknowledgement. Giving your community members that attention, will inspire them to engage even more. Others who see that activity will also be more encouraged to engage. Everyone will be inspired to engage with each other, forming true communal bonds around your brand.

Keep That Community Positive

You need to maintain a healthy and safe space to keep that engagement and your community flourishing. Online communities need moderation and supervision. It’s unfortunately easy in online spaces for someone to enter and be toxic. Along with being harmful, they will scare off others from engaging. Be sure to remove that kind of activity from your community to keep dedicated followers and your community healthy. Followers will continue to energetically engage and those who witness that moderation will be inspired to remain in your brand’s safe community.

Educate, Entertain, and Inform

Along with promotional content, provide a variety of content that is educational, entertaining, and informative. The variety keeps your community actively interested and engaged. Educational content can teach your audience about some niche information about your brand and industry. Behind the scenes (BTS) content showcases your company’s human element, and the insider view lets your audience feel connected of your brand and its people. Entertaining content is another opportunity to show off your brand’s personality. It can also jump on a recent social media trend. That further inspires a community who will want to engage with the momentarily relevant content. 

Championing a Cause

It may seem outside your business’ scope to have your brand comment on a societal issue, but championing a cause helps unite and inspire your community. In 2019, Edelman found that 81% of people felt they must trust a brand to purchase from them, and in 2021, they found customers are 7x more likely to purchase from brands they trust. A central factor of that trust is not just honest business practices. People’s trust in businesses relies on their stance on a social issue. 53% of customers say they need their brands to take a stand on at least one social issue, and 86% expect brands to take one or more actions beyond their business or production, primarily addressing at least one societal concern. 

Motivating your followers to contribute or benefit such a social cause will inspire and empower them. They will associate your brand and its community with a larger social impact and benefit. Posts on a certain issue relevant to your brand provide a great opportunity for your followers to engage and feel inspired. If you brand contributes to a charity, you can encourage followers to also donate or promote. Brands for charitable organizations or non-profits can directly inspire followers to action by engaging directly with your content, fundraisers, and events.

Stick to Your Brand and Its Values

Your brand shouldn’t champion every cause or jump on every trend. It will reduce your content’s impact, confuse your brand’s core personality, and undermine its authenticity. Brand personalities are like people; they need to stay consistent for people to trust them. Stick to a select few causes that pair with the character and values of your brand. Your followers and customers can associate these with your brand. A fashion business may promote a cause for body positivity or a charity that provides clothes to the impoverished. Any small business can champion a charity or cause that’s part of their local community. 

Recognize Your Community

Beyond just engaging and inspiring them, have content that recognizes your community. If your community creates their own content with your brand or participates in your charitable acts, be sure to acknowledge and celebrate those accomplishments. If your business sees some success or reaches a certain milestone, recognize how your community has played an important role in that accomplishment. This recognition of a symbiotic relationship strengthens your followers’ bonds with your brand. They will only be more inspired to engage with and support your business and brand.

Start An Inspiring Strategy

With these essential tactics you can start to build a strategy of inspiring content. An engaged community around your brand will stay dedicated to supporting your business and expanding its reach. If you’re looking to build a social media strategy and start creating inspiring content suited to your brand, talk with Rosewood’s social media marketing team. We can help you flesh out an entire long-term plan for inspiring that following.

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