How to measure your engagement
How to understand the bigger picture, from how many people are seeing your content, to how much money your posts are earning.
Walmart Creator Team
Let’s start with the basics (we promise—it’s not rocket science). What are social media metrics? Social media metrics are the data points that show you how well your social strategy and content are performing. These metrics help you understand the bigger picture: from how many people are seeing your content, to how much money your posts are earning. The end goal? Personal improvement, growth, and community.
Let’s get technical with it.
First up, awareness metrics. These are the metrics that help you measure how many people are seeing your content, and how much attention you’re getting on social. Let’s break this down into a few key categories:
1. Reach
Reach means the number of people who see your content. It’s smart to monitor your average reach, as well as the reach of each individual post, story, or video. A valuable subset of this metric is what percentage of your reach is made up of followers vs. non-followers. If a lot of non-followers are seeing your content, that means it’s being shared or doing well in the algorithms, or both. A two-for-one!2. Impressions
Impressions indicate the number of times people saw your content. It can be higher than reach because the same person might look at your content more than once. An especially high level of impressions compared to reach means people are looking at your post multiple times.3. Audience growth rate
Audience growth rate measures how many new followers you get on social media within a certain amount of time. It’s not a simple count of your new followers. Instead, it measures your new followers as a percentage of your total audience. So when you’re just starting out, getting 10 or 100 new followers in a month can give you a high growth rate. But once you have a larger existing audience, you need more new followers to maintain that momentum.Ok: math time. To calculate your audience growth rate, track your net new followers (on each platform) over a reporting period. Then divide that number by your total audience (on each platform) and multiply by 100 to get your audience growth rate percentage. (PS: You can track your competitors’ progress the same way if you want to benchmark your performance!)
Next up we have engagement metrics. These metrics show how much people actually interact with your content, as opposed to just seeing it.
4. Engagement rate
Engagement Rate measures the number of engagements (reactions, comments, and shares) your content gets as a percentage of your audience. How you define “audience” may vary. You might want to calculate engagement relative to your number of followers. But remember that not all your followers will see each post. Plus, you might get engagement from people who don’t (yet) follow you.So, there are multiple ways to calculate engagement.
- Engagement rate benchmarks:
- Facebook: 0.06%
- Instagram: 0.68%
- (Note: These benchmarks are based on engagements as a percentage of followers).
5. Amplification rate
Amplification Rate is the ratio of shares per post to the number of overall followers. In short, the higher your amplification rate, the more your followers are expanding your reach for you by sharing your content. To calculate amplification rate, divide a post’s total number of shares by your total number of followers. Multiply by 100 to get your amplification rate as a percentage.6. Virality rate
Virality Rate is similar to amplification rate in that it measures how much your content is shared. However, a virality rate calculates shares as a percentage of impressions rather than as a percentage of followers. Remember that every time someone shares your content, it achieves a fresh set of impressions via their audience. So virality rate measures how your content is spreading exponentially. To calculate virality rate, divide a post’s number of shares by its impressions. Multiply that by 100 to get your virality rate as a percentage. Now let’s talk about video metrics. These metrics measure how people are interacting with your video content.7. Video views
If you’re creating videos (a great way to boost growth!), you want to know how many people are watching them. Each social platform determines what counts as a "view" a little differently, but usually, even a few seconds of watch time counts as a "view". So, video views are a great at-a-glance indication of how many people have seen at least the start of your video. However: it’s not as important as…8. Video completion rate
This measures how often people actually watch your videos all the way through to the end. This is a good indicator that you’re creating quality content that connects with your audience. Video completion rate is a key rewarding signal to many social media algorithms, so this is a good one to focus on improving!So. The big question: Why is tracking social media metrics so important? At the end of the day, social media metrics tell you whether your strategy is working and reveal how you can improve. They show you how much effort and money you’re spending, what you’re getting in return, and where to shift your strategy to avoid downward trends. Nifty.
Which leads us to another big question: How do you track social media metrics? We know: we’ve talked a lot about how to calculate the various social metrics already. But where do you find the data in the first place? Here we’ll explain where to access the information you need to start your calculations.
Each social network has its own analytics tools, where you can find the raw data you need to calculate and track your social media success. (Your Walmart Creator account also automatically calculates metrics for you to review.)
Numbers matter, but ultimately it’s about listening to your audience! Creating content that inspires, engages and supports them is the name of the game. And while measuring metrics is important to garner insights, you can also look to human interaction and insights to direct your overall strategy: how people are responding and reacting to your content. Metrics can give you a numeric reading, but the emotional reading is between the posts!
