The big day is here — you finally created a social media presence for your business, and you’re feeling pretty good about the direction your marketing efforts are going in. You can post all day long (definitely not #NiceGirl recommended), but if you don’t measure your results and ROI, then how do you know if your campaigns are successful? Regularly analyzing your data is a vital piece of the social media puzzle, and you likely need to call in a social media agency like Nice Branding Agency to make sense of it all.
Back up. Did you just say your business is not on social media? Okay, start here by reading our previous post on
social media for business and creating a
social media content calendar. Then bookmark this blog post and come back to it after a few months of solid social posting.
If you start clicking around within a social media platform’s settings, it won’t take too long to stumble across a little tab called “Insights” or “Analytics.” The graphs and numbers may look intimidating, and you need to ask yourself if you truly understand what all of those insights mean.
You may feel like you get the gist of it all just by looking at whether or not you have green arrows indicating an increase or red arrows showing that, well, your numbers aren’t looking so great.
Let us be the first to tell you there is more to the story than those little arrows. Some social media metrics matter more than others. Impressions and engagements should rank among the first metrics that you dive into and analyze.
With ever-changing social algorithms, it’s important to continuously monitor engagements and impressions to determine if your content is actually being seen by consumers and resonating with them.
But what do the terms “engagements” and “impressions” mean, and what’s the difference? Here’s a crash course to help you understand social media jargon and how it impacts your business.
Engagements | Defined by A Social Media Agency
If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on… no guys, we’re not talking about that type of engagement! But social media engagements do have a strong correlation on whether or not a consumer likes (or loves), your brand, your social media post, or your messaging. And if they liked it, then they’ll put a heart on it — or something of the sort.
Basically, an engagement is defined as the number of times people interact with your content. Think double taps on Instagram, likes, comments, shares, retweets, clicks, etc.
Quickly scroll through your business’ social accounts. Are there any thumbs up, hearts, or a lot of comments? If yes, then your social media content may be heading in the right direction. But don’t start giving yourself a pat on the back quite yet. Just because you have one or two likes does not mean that you are owning the social media game.
Your marketing team or a social media agency needs to regularly analyze all of your posts to determine if your social media campaigns are receiving consistent, quality engagements.
If people are continuously sharing your content, it usually means you have created something that people want to tell their friends about. And the same goes for a like or retweet — there was something about your post to make the consumer think, “Hey, I like that!” Or, with Facebook Reactions, the user can express all different types of reactions to your content. Your post has the possibility to make the consumer sad, angry, or it could even give them a good LOL.
The primary purpose of social media is to raise awareness, build community, and get consumers excited about your business. You ultimately want to turn people who see your social content into customers and faithful brand advocates, right?
Knowing that engagements are one of the most valuable social media metrics should put a fire under you to get moving to create a compelling strategy that is focused on getting more people to engage with your content.
Impressions | Defined by A Social Media Agency
The impressions metric can be deceiving. You might think the definition of it is linked to whether a consumer was impressed with your content, but that’s not the case. We’ll leave that piece of data to engagements.
An impression is the number of times your content is delivered into a user’s feed. And the more engagements your content receives, the more impressions it should receive.
Say that we publish a Nice Branding Agency Facebook post, and it totally rocks the engagements. It’s shared like crazy, so more and more people see our post. What does that mean for impressions? Our impressions are going to significantly increase because that piece of content is now going to be delivered into the newsfeeds of friends of people who shared our post.
Shareable content is key to get your impressions on the rise, so it’s just another reason to make sure that your business is publishing social media content that truly connects with people.
You can think of impressions as a recruiting tool for your social media business. If more people have your business’ social posts being delivered to their feed, your brand awareness should increase, and again, that means more potential customers for you and your biz.
It’s the moment of truth. Are your social media platforms getting quality engagements and impressions? If not, it’s time to call your social media agency — Nice Branding.
Contact us today if you want to see improved social metrics and see more buzz from potential customers as our team crafts engaging stories and imagery to tell your brand’s story.
