Eight tools to measure social media engagement

Social media engagement can be challenging, but luckily there are many tools to measure it effectively.

One of the hardest KPIs in social media marketing is to measure social media engagement.

The challenge starts by defining what counts as successful social media engagement.

The most common metrics to analyse the success of a social presence are split in:

• post-level engagement
• page-level engagement

Post-level engagement includes:

• likes, shares, comments: the most basic metrics for social media engagement track the user interaction with each post. These serve as a primary indicator of whether the post was interesting enough to grab the target audience’s attention.
• clicks: the number of clicks for each post serves as an enhanced way to show a user’s interest towards a post. Although a like or a share is still happening at the same social platform, a click directs users to the company’s page, which brings further marketing opportunities.
• organic vs paid performance: a modern social strategy involves both organic and paid activity. It’s useful to examine how engagement is split between the existing audience and the newly acquired one. This can become a great way to justify the ROI both for organic and paid activity, focusing more on the best performing one.
• lead generation: a long-term goal for any marketing activity is to generate new leads for every business. Although social media marketing is usually focusing more on awareness, it can still offer great new prospects. Social media engagement contributes to the initial conversation with a new audience and this can become very important for the next steps.

Page-level engagement examines social engagement at a broader level and it includes:

• the growth of followers: the ratio of following and followers can help a business examine whether the set social strategy is successful, by measuring the consistency in the number of new followers.
• mentions: the number of mentions a social profile receives can indicate the success of the content.
• audience participation: a good measurement of social engagement is to analyse how active a community is. It’s not just about seeing an increase in the number of followers, but also tracking how active they are and how they react to each post.
• the relevance of demographics: Once the community starts growing, the next step is to explore whether the audience is relevant to the target demographics. If they fit the company’s personas, it’s easier to justify the ROI of a social media strategy that brings effective results.

Eight social media engagement tools to improve your brand’s social strategy

Native social analytics

Native social analytics make a good start in the measurement of social engagement. Facebook and Twitter offer an overview of the posts’ and the page’s performance, while it’s also possible to go deeper into the analytics and explore the demographics, or the best performing posts and the time and day they were sent. These can offer a great start in the engagement strategy and how to create content from now on.

Facebook’s insights can get very detailed, which is very useful when you’re still learning your target audience. It offers both a general overview of the engagement, but it also analyses the number of likes, comments, shares, clicks on each post. In addition to these, it also offers more details on the best performing types of posts, helping marketers create more effective content.

Twitter’s analytics don’t offer an equal number of insights, but they are still detailed enough to help a brand create engaging content. They still offer insights both for post-level and page-level engagement, comparing the tweets’ performance with the previous month. The engagement rate is analysed both for the month, but also for the day, which offers an overview of the best performing tweets and what makes a successful post.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a powerful platform for all marketers. Except for social scheduling and monitoring, it can also be useful in measuring engagement. What makes Hootsuite important is the ability to combine all social platforms in one tool in a visually appealing way that makes the analysis of their performance easier.

It offers detailed engagement reports for the most popular social platforms, while it also includes a report from Google Analytics for additional insights. These provide an overview of the follower growth, the mentions, the shares, along with the demographics of the audience. The combination of these reports can provide a solid analysis of a brand’s social performance and the engagement for each social platform. Moreover, it can also be useful in monitoring the daily engagement, organising all social networks through customised columns, keeping mentions, retweets, shares and any brand alerts organised.

Buffer

Buffer is one of the most popular social scheduling platforms. Except for scheduling, it also features a great analysis of each social network’s performance, from the engagement on each post to the weekly average of clicks, interactions and mentions.

This allows marketers to compare the posts’ engagement with the previous week or month, helping them discover what they need to improve. Moreover, Buffer is also presenting the stats in visually appealing graphs, which make it easier to present this information to other stakeholders.

The Business plan offers a great number of graphs, both for post-level and page-level engagement. The analytics provide a useful overview of the weekly and monthly engagement, improving the ease of measuring engagement while keeping track of the changes through the week or the month. Engagement can also become more specific in new graphs, analysing the number of clicks, the interactions, the likes, or the followers, all compared to custom periods if needed along with discovering the most engaging times of the day for each account.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a powerful platform for social media engagement. It promises to simplify a social media engagement strategy, with the use of a Smart Inbox that compiles all the social networks and the received messages in one organised page.

If your brand is serious about social engagement, then Sprout Social can be very useful to monitor the incoming messages, responding to them as fast as possible in a visualised progress. The progress of your social media engagement strategy can be easily tracked with in-depth reports, analysing the number of messages, the replies, the response rate and your social networks’ performance in engagement.

Moreover, it features an analytics suite to provide more details on your post-level and page-level engagement, while it can also highlight new opportunities with trend and influencer analysis. This is ideal for a brand combining social media with influencer marketing when seeking for improved engagement.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics can also be helpful when measuring engagement, as it can blend social performance with a wider marketing performance. Google Analytics can offer an analysis to the number of clicks, the social traffic coming from each platform, the time spent on each page and how that changes depending on each social network and their interest in their content, from the bounce rate to the comments or the shares on each page.

These can offer very useful results on the ROI coming from social media and how social engagement can also go beyond the social platforms, turning the social audience into prospective customers.

Mention

Mention is a very handy tool to monitor your brand’s mentions. The number of mentions indicates the interest in your brand’s content. Thus, it’s useful to stay on top of them and the opportunities they may bring. These can include joining conversations to build relationships and trust for your brand, or even improving the brand awareness by reacting to the right content at the right time.

Mention’s platform facilitates the engagement with the brand’s fans, while it’s also easy to assign tasks to each team member. This way the engagement can remain high, while the analytics can explain where your brand is good at and what needs to be improved.

Crowdfire

Crowdfire can be very useful in maintaining a balanced following and follower ratio. If you’re trying to build a targeted audience on Instagram or Twitter, Crowdfire can simplify the process. It’s possible to follow a set number of people depending on a keyword or the location and monitor if they follow back. If they don’t, you can use the app again to unfollow them and maintain a healthy follow/unfollow ratio.

A brand with a large number of followings but not an equally large number of followers could mean that there’s not mutual interest among users to follow it back. Thus, it’s usually preferred to improve the follow/unfollow ratio and a tool like Crowdfire can make the process easier. This way there are more chances to build a relevant audience, without affecting the brand’s credibility.

Simply Measured

Simply Measured offers a complete platform for social engagement, simplifying the measurement of social engagement with a cross-channel view.

Filtering can provide reports based on channel, media type, text, or hashtags, while activity spikes explain when the biggest engagement occurred.

Engagement can also conveniently be analysed by campaign, event or product with the use of custom tags, providing further insights on how the audience reacts to different posts. Engagement and social performance can also be compared to your competitors, a useful analysis that can help your brand create more successful content. Reports are visually appealing and can help you save time when presenting the ROI of your social strategy to other team members.

In addition to these, Simply Measured can also help with the analysis of social conversion and how engagement can contribute to the company’s marketing goals. A complete

If you also want to involve social media and their engagement metrics to your complete sales funnel, there is an additional product on Conversion Tracking, blending your social stats with your sales performance. This can be ideal if you’re trying to explain how social media followers can become customers, following their journey from the first engagement to the final decision.

Which social media engagement tools to use

There are many tools that can help you analyse your brand’s social media engagement and the final choice depends on your company’s goals and the best way to measure them.

Some tools focus more on post-level engagement and its measurement, while others may offer a broader analysis of the page-level engagement. There are also other tools that can offer specific analytics on the measurement that matters most for your brand, without necessarily needing a complete social marketing platform.

After you decide on the metrics that you want to measure, the next step is to test several tools until you find the ones that work better for your brand.

Many tools may provide similar measurements, but the decision can rely on the visual appeal and the best way that makes sense for you and your brand.

Last but not least, it’s also important to consider your budget and how each tool can meet your expectations. This can involve the number of features of each tool, whether there are any add-ons, or even how the customer support can improve the user experience.