Three important metrics to measure social media engagement

Your social media account’s reach is the amount of people who have seen your social media content. Reach ultimately captures the potential size of your audience. It’s important to know how many people are coming across your message. Reach lets you know this by tracking how many people have seen your content.The reach number can even tell you a lot about other social media aspects of your social media presence. If you pick the critical action or engagement number (like the number of clicks, retweets, replies, etc.) and divide them by reach, you can calculate an engagement percentage.Your reach does not tell everything about your social media engagement. It just shows the audience that’s seeing your post. This is opposed to the audience that’s actually engaging with your posts. Reach is not the same thing as impressions. Your reach on social media is the number of how many people see your content. Impressions are the number of times your content was displayed. Having an impression simply means your content was delivered to someone’s feed. This does not mean they saw your content. One person can see the same piece of content more than once, so reach is a more reliable number to know how many people you’re reaching. However, reach is not the only way you can determine how many people are looking at your social media content.  

Engagement lets you know how many people are participating in a conversation about you or your brand.Social media engagement does not boil down to a single interaction. Think of engagement as more of a relationship – it’s long-term and you want the other party to feel fulfilled. It’s about creating an open line of communication between you and your audience over an extended period of time. Most social media platforms allow you to like, share, or comment on content. All of these actions tell you different things about your content and your brand. Engagement lets you know who’s sharing your content. Twitter lets you retweet posts onto your own Twitter profile. Facebook lets you share content onto your profile. Comments, likes, and replies tell you who is responding to your content. You’ll be surprised by some of the content that generates the most responses from internet users. It’s essential to respond to the comments and replies your social media account attracts. Doing so increases brand loyalty and sales. It also increases the likelihood that people will remember your brand later on.Be sure to respond in a timely fashion. Consumers expect a brand’s social media page to respond within zero to four hours. In reality, it usually takes ten hours for a brand’s social media page to take note of a comment and reply to it. If people see that your account is interactive, they’re more likely to continue engaging with you on social media. They might tag you in pictures or devote entire posts to you. However, engagement doesn’t tell everything. People might still be talking about you or your brand on social media. Be sure to search for relevant keywords and brand names to be in the know about who’s talking about you on social media.