Social Media Marketing: Measuring ROI without the use of Vanity Metrics

Can any business survive in the digital industry without utilizing social media today? Well, you know the answer yourself!

Social media has become an increasingly popular channel for numerous digital marketing efforts. From a simple sharing platform for friends and family, social media has turned itself into a fast-selling monster to which no one can stay oblivious. It can reach large audiences, many organizations are using different social media platforms to build a dedicated selling platform for their businesses.

Similar to other digital channels, the efforts put into social media are measurable. The best part about social media is that we can measure the results based on various metrics such as vanity metrics. Vanity metrics shows the data on likes, comments, followers, and shares, but these are often dismissed as meaningless. One should avoid using ‘vanity’ metrics while trying to get a clear picture of one’s social media performance.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Todd Hallett, SVP, GTM Strategy at Dataiku

We do not say that vanity metrics are meaningless, but there are other ways to measure your social media performance with metrics other than vanity. Let us decode these metrics here:

1. Impressions

Impressions help you measure your brand’s awareness levels and are one of the most important social media metrics.

Impressions act as the best indicator of your brand’s visibility on social media platforms. Impressions define your audience’s perception, and refer to your brand’s content exposure, for instance, how many times the users have viewed a post.

Why do Impressions Matter?

• They help you evaluate how impactful your content was.
• They show if your content added value for your audience.
• Tracking impressions will tell you which type of content worked most on your social media feed.

All the social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have their way to measure impressions. You can use the built-in analytics tools in each of the platforms to get a record of your impressions.

2. Engagement Rate

The comments and likes on a social media post mean a lot for your overall social media performance. A combined insight into them will give you an engagement rate. Thus, the engagement rate is the interaction of users with the content you posted. It includes likes, comments, messages, shares, and click-throughs.

How does Engagement Rate Matter?

Can you grow on social media if your content doesn’t resonate with your audience? Well, you know the answer.

The average engagement rate will help you understand if your content is working for your audience and how you should curate your future strategy, and include content that fetches better results.

You can track your average engagement rate based on:

• Reach
• Post Popularity
• Impressions

3. Social Media Growth Rate

What was your aim behind starting a social media page a few years back? It would not be anything less than increasing your following to millions. Honestly, every brand looks forward to more followership, and you are sailing in the same boat. But the size of your audience comes under the vanity metric, so what should you track instead?

Measure the rate at which your audience is increasing. It is an indication of social media growth.

Why should you measure growth rate?

Social media conversions, impressions, and engagement are directly related to your growth. Moreover, measuring the growth will tell you how better you can connect with your audience.

4. Conversion Rate

Conversion is a prime metric for every business with an active presence on social media. You must know how effectively you can convert your customers, and it is a simple indication of your successful social media efforts.

The conversion rate will depend upon the criteria used to measure it. The criteria could be more downloads, newsletter subscriptions, purchases, or anything related to your business goals.

Why does conversion rate matter?

Simply put, conversion rate gives you a fair idea of the ROI for your social media efforts.

5. Rate of Virality

We already mentioned that likes and comments are superficial indicators of success. What matters more is the virality rate of the content posted. As likes and comments indicate passive engagement, the virality rate indicates how actively your audience interacts with your posts.

Why does it matter?

Virality rate takes a deep dive into the engagement metric. It determines how many users engage with your content in proportion to the impressions the same has received. It gives us the rate at which your post spreads among the audience.

Marketing Technology News: AI Should Mean More Than Just ChatGPT for Brand Marketers

End Note

Many digital marketers are stuck with tracking only vanity metrics, but beyond the number of followers, likes, and comments, there are other meaningful metrics to evaluate that can drive better conversions on social media.