But how to define it? What metrics to track? Which metrics are actionable? How to measure them right? Business owners have so many questions and so fewer answers. Because a new metric emerges each passing month, it’s natural to feel lost when determining which ones matter for your brand recognition. But don’t worry, we’re here to help you sort everything out. 

In this blog post, we’ll clarify crucial social media metrics and how to track and interpret them to define your brand awareness.

 

Actionable Metrics in SMM and Their Importance

Let’s first start with a quick overview of a four-stage funnel where all social media metrics are categorized. In a nutshell, there are four main stages in a social funnel:

  • The awareness stage is a starting one and covers the topic of our article. Here, the main focus is to measure how users are aware of your brand; 
  • The engagement stage is where we evaluate the level of users’ interactions with your brand; 
  • Conversion stage metrics are to assess how many conversions are made by the users with your brand;
  • The consumer stage is the last but not least part of the funnel. The social media metrics at this stage aimed at understanding what people feel when interacting with your brand.

Thus, all these stages and metrics have particular goals and objectives. But what unifies them all is the idea to analyze how your marketing and SMM strategies work. This article will elaborate on the first stage of a funnel and metrics your brand needs to define awareness. 

 

3 Most Valuable Awareness Metrics in SMM

Post reach and impressions

These metrics are essential for evaluating brand perception among their users. Post reach indicates the number of views on your posts on social media networks. While impressions denote the number of times your posts appeared in one’s timeline. 

To calculate post reach, you should know the number of your followers and views of one post you choose. Below, you can see the formula to count it:

If you realized your post reach score is low, there are several tools you can use to increase it. For example, using the growth tool called Lempod, you can boost your post reach by ten times on Linkedin. Or, for instance, you can find out the hours when your audience is the most active and post your content accordingly.

Social Share of Voice (SSoV)

The primary goal of any business on the road to brand awareness is to become the top of mind in the user’s consciousness. The Social Share of Voice metric was created to indicate how many and often users mention your brand in the social media networks. This includes how often your brand name was tagged or used in a hashtag by someone. Thus, there are two main directions brands should take into account when measuring this metric: the volume (the number of mentions) and the sentiment (positive or negative connotation of these mentions). Knowing this data, you can compare your competitors’ results, analyze your current market share, and find areas for improvement. You can measure your SSoV by incorporating social listening tools such as Mention or Brand24.

To increase this metric’s score and overcome competitors, here are some tips on this topic:

  • Avoid long periods without any posts on your social media. Brands need to be active, so will be your users. Schedule your preferable social media content plan and post it regularly; 
  • Generate engaging and share-worthy content to keep your users interested;
  • Try to post various content formats to test which one gets more mentions and virality among your audience.

Audience Growth Rate

Your audience is your main focus at any stage of the funnel, especially at the awareness stage when you start growing your brand. So, counting their amount is one more significant metric every business should pay attention to. The main idea behind this rate is to measure the enlargement of your audience over particular periods (a day, week, month, year). Based on this metric, brands can analyze what factors or conditions influence the user’s churn, make data-driven decisions to increase it, and compare the results over time. The formula to calculate this rate is pretty simple:

Also, you could employ followers tracking tools to facilitate this process. Here are a few examples for Instagram: Follower Analyzer, Reports+, Followers Insights.

Closing thought

Tracking the key social media metrics allows brands to assess the current number of your posts’ shares or user’s growth and get useful insights on your marketing and SMM strategy. By analyzing data from these metrics, you’ll know what areas to improve or what changes to make to skyrocket your brand awareness.

We hope this article was helpful for you, but it’s not the end of our topic. We shared the list of tips only for the funnel’s first stage; other metrics are yet to come soon.