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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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Successfully Working with Your Marketing Team

Some of the Rosewood Team standing side by side smiling.

We’ve previously explained how to maintain and manage your business’ relationship with influencers. This time we’re going to look at how you can work successfully with your marketing team, like the one at Rosewood Marketing. They work closely alongside your business to create meaningful and impactful marketing campaigns. It is an active and long-term relationship, and a marketing team will require consistent collaboration from other parts of your business. You will want to follow certain practices that ensure their optimal performance. After all, their success is also yours. Here’s how to successfully work with your marketing team.

Regular and Clear Communication

Every relationship relies on clear and consistent communication, and it’s no less true for successfully working with your marketing team. Maintain a steady dialogue so that you keep each other updated. Inform your marketing team as early as possible with all the pertinent details about new products or new services, collaborations with other companies, attendances at public events, etc. This is invaluable information about your business’ work, and your marketing team can only plan around them if they receive this information early. At the same time, marketing can move fast, so it’s also beneficial if they can ask pertinent questions and have them answered promptly to jump on a sudden trend. In turn, they can update your business in a timely manner and can provide updates with regular performance reports and analytics. 

Have and Update Your Goals

Your marketing team will create, handle, and communicate any plans they make to accomplish your business’ marketing goals. However, you and your business need to first set those goals. Ask yourself some questions. What do you hope marketing will accomplish for your business? Do you want to increase discoverability or advertise certain products? Are there aspects of your business you want to highlight or receive more attention? The answers to those questions will help provide the basis for a marketing team to start planning. Remember to continue asking these questions, so that you can regularly communicate new or revised goals to your marketing team. 

Listen to Your Marketing Team

With clear communication and these goals set, your marketing team can help identify the best and optimal channels to accomplish them and start formulating plans and timelines. To work successfully with your marketing team, listen to their input and feedback. They will develop clear objectives from your goals and define key performance indexes (KPIs) for tracking progress. They will be able to tell you whether online advertising, social media, or search engine optimization will be most effective, along with the best practices. Your marketing team may refine or revise your goals based on their own professional experience or identify certain communication and information as necessary. Similarly, their reports will include insightful analysis that explains and interprets the various statistics. 

All of this is valuable information, so listen. Just as your marketing team will rely on your knowledge about your business and industry, you rely on their expertise and knowledge about marketing. They are experts in communication channels, tools, and methods. They understand what the general public and more specifically your community wants, expects, and needs to see. Your marketing team will use that expertise to produce effective marketing, introduce you to unfamiliar concepts, and guide you through any new processes. Your marketing team is just as invested in its success, so heeding their insight is essential to successfully working with them.

Provide Them with Materials

The best marketing content has real depictions of your business. People love to see authenticity at work. Stock photography is convenient and has its uses, but the strongest and most successful marketing has images and videos of your business, its products, and team. Unfortunately, your marketing team cannot always be present to capture such content. Thankfully, most people today have phones with great cameras sitting in their pockets. Take pictures and record videos of your business operating when the opportunity arises. We recommend creating a cloud drive such as Google Drive or Dropbox where you can regularly upload the materials for your marketing team to access. Not everything might be a perfect asset for your marketing team, but regularly providing them with those materials will give them a treasury for creating some truly outstanding and special marketing. If you want some more professional materials, consider getting professional photography and videography of your business and brand.

There are myriad other materials that can help your marketing team be successful. Branding materials from companies whose products you carry are high quality and valuable. Has your business received thank you messages? Those are fantastic testimonials for your marketing team to advertise. If you’re not sure what materials might be useful and your marketing team has, it is best to ask. Your marketing team will happily inform you of the kinds of materials that can help them be more successful. 

A Critical Part of Your Business

Following these best practices is critical to successfully working with your marketing team. Steady communication, clear and definitive goals, space for input, and a regular supply of materials will provide them the basis to help your business grow. Your marketing team is a critical component of your business, and like any organ, it needs to work together with the others to ensure the body’s, in this case your business’, health and success. If you are ready to start meeting your marketing goals, contact Rosewood today.

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Google Ads Are Great for Small Business

Google building hosting ads great for small business

It’s a misconception that the monolithic online advertising platform of Google Ads is only for large businesses. Google Ads provides a platform that is actually advantageous for small businesses to grow their reach and brand discoverability. Scalability, precise targeting, and detailed reports make Google Ads great for small business. If you’re curious how, keep reading.  

Budgeting that Scales

Scalability is one of the central reasons Google Ads is perfect for large and small businesses alike. Google Ads doesn’t require running a full marketing platform of every kind of campaign with a massive budget. Instead, small businesses can start with a single targeted campaign and expand as you determine what methods are successful. After that, it is easy to scale up and down as needed. This is great for small businesses who occasionally have product or service launches, special promotions, or more active seasonal periods. Google Ads makes it easy to run those additional campaigns at the appropriate times and scale back to more standard ads when its timely.

Pay Per Click Model is Great for Small Businesses

Google Ads run on a pay or cost per click model, i.e., a business only pays for each click on the ad. The rates for these ads are according to the search terms set for the ad. More popular key terms will have a higher fee than those searched less frequently. This is great for small businesses because they often operate in a niche, meaning their ad key terms can be more focused and cheaper. Furthermore, you will only be paying for the ads that are working, meaning an ad’s cost is directly relational to its performance.

Targeting Locality

Today, many small businesses benefit from online sales, but they still rely largely on local customers and clients. This makes Google Ads especially great for small businesses. Over 46% of Google searches are for local information. This means nearly half the searches made by those near your small business are providing ideal advertising opportunities. With Google’s Geotargeting, you can define your ads to appear specifically in searches made in the area around your business. Google’s detailed metrics even allows you to target certain demographics within those locals. Overall, Google Ads are great for increasing your business’ local presence and discoverability.

Customizability where Ads Appear

Google Ads can appear in Google searches, shopping suggestions at the top, maps, Play apps, and partner websites. This provides a small business with a wide assortment of places to put their ads. These further allow a business to target a specific demographic or potential client. For example, product-based businesses can have their products appear at the top of any search as a shopping suggestion, increasing your business’ discoverability as a shopping option.

Clear Metrics and Transparent Results for Small Businesses

Google provides thorough and clear statistics and reports for any ads and campaigns you run. These statistics will indicate which leads generate clicks, where ads are most effective, and what kind of ads people respond to. For small businesses that will be creating fewer and more targeted ads, this provides immensely valuable information for tracking performance and selecting and creating the most effective ads. Those metrics also include detailed budget tracking that is highly beneficial for small businesses. These clearly show the ROI of each ad and campaign so you can properly scale and allocate your advertising budget appropriately.

Great Feedback for Small Business SEO

Advertising tends to provide more immediate results for determining what generates clicks and visits to your business’ website than building up its search engine optimization (SEO). Smaller businesses tend to add pages slower to their websites, since they inherently have a smaller content production pipeline. This can make optimizing search engine performance a lengthier process for a small business. However, SEO is vital for the performance of your business’ website in searches and growing your brand’s discoverability. The performance metrics from Google Ads are great for a small business to determine what potential customers or clients are interested in, helping you tailor your site’s content to organically appear more often in their searches.  

Getting Started with Google Ads

Hopefully this short list of key features of Google Ads makes it clear how the platform is great for small businesses. It’s scalability, local functionality, diverse tool set, and detailed reporting make it ideal for small business advertising. Want to start growing your business’ discoverability with Google Ads? Contact Rosewood and ask about our Google Ad services to help you get you started!

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