The Importance of Metrics in Social Media Marketing

Heidi Jewell serves as a senior account manager with VOCO Creative, a leading marketing agency in Denver, Colorado. Before taking up social media and digital campaign marketing with the Denver firm, Heidi Jewell produced and hosted You Ought to Know Nashville for PBS.

Because it all takes place online, social media marketing generates large quantities of data. Many successful businesses use data from social media campaigns to track performance, sorting the data into key metrics that can be used to assess progress. Without these key metrics, there would be no reliable way to know which strategies engage customers and which ones waste marketing resources.

A common social media metric tracked by companies is audience growth rate, which refers to the percent change in audience size over time. In most cases, audience growth rate can be used as a proxy measurement for the overall momentum of the campaign. Another important social media metric is conversion, or the percentage of website visitors that engage in sales, subscription, or some other defined action. Conversion is closely related to sales revenue, which is why companies often pay close attention to conversion rates on social media campaigns.