Do you have your own company or are you simply trying to increase engagement on your personal social media profiles? As you probably already know, it is difficult to stand out on social media platforms due to the vast amount of users and information available.

So if you feel that you aren’t standing out on social media don’t be discouraged because there are many different social media marketing tactics that you can utilize to optimize your profile. If you already have the basics of social media down then its time for the next step in creating an unstoppable social media strategy by using analytics.

Analytics allow you to view descriptive insights and metrics regarding your social media posts and profiles. You can analyze valuable data about engagement, your profiles performance, and even follower behavior. Thus, using analytics to understand and optimize your profile could be the key that you have been looking for. But it is interesting because many people seem to neglect this tactic in their social media marketing strategy for a variety of reasons. Unfortunately, using analytics can be time-consuming, it takes consistency and it involves a lot of statistics. But understand it is crucial and it could be the tactic that helps you grow your following exponentially.

So are you ready to take the first step in social media marketing domination by better understanding your audiences and optimizing our social media profiles through analytics? If you are, here are three basic social media metrics you need to utilize and understand in order to grow your following.

Social media impressions is the amount of times a post or advertisement has been shown to a user. An impression doesn’t necessarily mean a post or advertisement view because the user doesn’t actually have to interact or engage with your post for it to be considered an impression. All of the major social networks track impressions, therefore you will be able to better understand how far your post reaches your potential audience. If you don’t understand the reason why you might track impressions, try thinking of it as potential brand awareness.

By increasing the number of impressions you have you are essentially increasing your posts “reach” on social media. Impressions are a great metric because it gives you a better understanding of your posts effectiveness and how often it is being displayed to users on the social network.

Social media engagement is when a user interacts with a post by liking, sharing or commenting on it. Thus, when users engage with your social media posts this will essentially increase its visibility and performance on the social network. Also having higher social media engagement increases the likelihood of other users interacting with the post and future content.

So if you are wondering why you should start tracking engagement, just remember that if you increase the engagement rate on your posts you will also grow your following.  Tracking engagement will help you better understand the performance of your social media posts and help you create quality and content that your following will be more likely to engage with it.

Every effective social media post must have a clear call to action. Often times the call to action is clicking a link to a company website, watching a video or clicking an article link. Thus, in many posts that incorporate content that involves media and links which are hosted outside of the social network, it is important to measure the clicks on this content. By tracking the click-through rate on your posts, you can determine the effectiveness of your posts call to action.  Furthermore, analyzing click-through rates will give you a better understanding of what content your followers actually enjoy or want to learn more about.

By measuring the click through rate of a social media post you can essentially optimize and re-create high click posts. This can be done by incorporating similar formatting, sentence structure or even similar call to actions. In addition, a company can increase click-through rates by using A/B testing, optimizing post types and diversifying content layouts.

So now that you understand a few of the basic social media marketing metrics it is time to starting utilizing them. By tracking social media metrics in depth you will be able to understand and optimize your profiles while growing your following. Therefore, start tracking your impressions, engagement, and click-through rates today, to develop a killer social media marketing strategy.

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