Social Media Measurement Tools

Measurement is an essential part of any marketing effort - and that includes social media marketing. As a business owner, you want to know the return on the investment you make toward your social media marketing efforts or your “ROI.” Understanding how to value and measure what you’re doing on social media - and how others respond to what you’re doing – helps you make smarter decisions about where to allocate money and resources for your social media activities.

To get the right metrics, review your overall business goals for using social media and be specific about what outcomes spell success for your company. Leverage free and fee-based tools to help monitor, measure, and analyze your social media marketing activities and campaigns.

To determine the impact of your social media marketing efforts, start with the analytics tools offered by each social network:

Facebook Audience Insights – Learn about the changes in the number of people reached and how people are interacting with your posts. Check how your posts are performing. Analyze your audience breakdown by age, gender, top cities, top countries, and top pages liked by your audience. You can even compare the performance of your business and content with similar businesses on Facebook.

Instagram Insights – Only available on the Instagram mobile app, learn more about your account’s followers and performance and see your audience’s engagement with specific posts, Stories, videos, Reels, and Live videos. Can include paid activity if you are boosting posts. You need to have a business or a creator account on Instagram to view insights.

Twitter Analytics – Measure and boost your impact on Twitter, see how well your posts generate engagement and learn how to make your Tweets more successful. Get a monthly snapshot of the number of tweets you’ve posted, the number of impressions the tweet generated, how many times your Twitter profile was visited, the number of mentions, and the gain or loss of followers. See your top tweet, top mention, top follower, and top media tweet.

Pinterest Analytics – Set up a Pinterest business account to gain access to your Pinterest analytics dashboard including organic, paid, and earned engagement for all of your Pins. Find out how people on Pinterest interact with your content that they repin to their own accounts. View your most popular Pins and ads on Pinterest to improve your content and media strategy. Link your website to your Pinterest account to get additional metrics.

YouTube Analytics – Get an overview of channel views plus a graph showing daily and weekly views, watch time in hours, and new subscribers as well as top content in a particular time period. You can also get more in-depth content-specific and audience-specific metrics and do some research to explore what content viewers on your channel are also viewing to refine the video content you upload.

TikTok Analytics

As TikTok increases in popularity, the company is providing some analytics for businesses using its platform. You can start by turning on Profile Views to see who viewed your profile. In the Creator tools area, you can turn on Analytics to see Engagement including video views, profile views, likes, comments, and shares. You can also see metrics posts and live videos. You can view analytics in the app or on the website.

In addition to analytics tools that are built into the popular social networks, you can get additional metrics from social media tools and dashboards such as HootSuite, ZohoSocial, and SproutSocial. URL shorteners such as Bitly and the scheduler Buffer also provide some metrics.

Other third-party measurement tools provide different types of monitoring, tracking, measuring, and analyzing tools for a variety of social networks. Most require that you give authorization access to your social media accounts, a standard practice that is relatively secure if you are using reputable tools, and they are fee-based.

Iconosquare – This app provides analytics for Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Includes follower growth, impressions, and reach, tracking post and Story performance, and the best times to post.

Tailwind – Use this app to not only create and schedule content but to also get metrics for your Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook accounts to track the performance of your pins and repins as well as some Pinterest post management and Instagram integration with Pinterest.

Later – This app offers enhanced Instagram analytics meant to help you get more views, increase your engagement, optimize your Instagram Stories, and drive traffic.

Social media marketing is not the most direct sales tool so using only sales growth as a metric ignores the other benefits including increasing brand awareness, enhancing customer service, strengthening customer relationships, and boosting traffic. Monitor engagement, conversions, and actions of any kind that support sales. Be realistic about what social media can do for your company and take advantage of available tools to get a clear picture of how well you are doing with your posts, interactions, and campaigns.