How to measure success for social media videos: Top metrics to track

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Are you wondering how effective your social media promotion and video marketing strategies are? One of the first things to do is measure their performance by tracking the right social media video metrics. 

The great thing about social media platforms is that almost every single detail is trackable, which can provide ample data to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.  It is important to keep in mind that not all metrics affect your bottom line the same way, and the most significant key performance indicators (KPIs) can vary from brand to brand. 

To truly measure the success of your social media videos, you will have to identify the metrics that matter most to your industry and business. Before diving into metrics, it's important to create engaging and captivating videos that have the potential to generate views. Fortunately, with the availability of various AI tools, it's now possible to edit videos online with minimal effort.

What are Social Media Video Metrics?

Social media metrics refer to the usage of data to measure the impact of social media activity on an organization’s revenue. Social media monitoring software is used to observe the activity on a company’s social media platform handles. 

Social media metrics can provide a wealth of information about how the target audience perceives a product, service, or brand name. It’s also among the top Google Ranking Factors that boost your brand’s visibility.  

In the online marketing world, there is much discussion about which metrics are useful and which aren’t. While some marketers prefer tracking metrics like click-throughs, time on page, comments, and shares, others use text analytics and SEO applications to measure audience sentiments.

In any case, marketers gather data to analyze whether or not the effort and time spent on social media marketing are paying off and giving a healthy Return on Investment (ROI).

Importance of Social Media Video Metrics 

Measuring social media metrics is important because they give you a good idea of how successful your campaign is and how effectively your social media strategy is performing. Having metrics in place will also make it possible to set measurable goals for your team by using a goal-setting framework like OKRs.

Your business’s social media handles are an extension of your brand, and understanding your social media metrics can help you evaluate the overall health of your business. Additionally, some activities like a new logo design can't always be turned into a clear ROI, but it should still be possible to see if your brand gains more and more recognition on that platform.

Consistent social media metric reports can help you revamp your business strategy, if needed, and lead to major shifts in how you conduct business. They also keep you aware of the impact your brand’s social media presence is having on the target audience. 

Choosing the right social media metrics is imperative to help you determine your campaigns’ effectiveness. Some common goals of analyzing your social media metrics could be:

  • Attracting more website traffic
  • Improving social media engagement (likes, shares, comments, etc.)
  • Getting more prospects 
  • Improving brand visibility, building a brand name, etc.
  • Building an image as a thought leader
  • Getting more conversions and sales

Top 11 Social Media Metrics to Track 

Social media data is so vast, and it is important to identify the metrics that matter to your business. While all metrics can be meaningful, you must figure out which metrics impact your business goals most.

1. Engagement 

The engagement rate is a good indicator of how much your target audience is involved with the content you post. Engagement is an umbrella term and covers quite a few subcategories, such as:

  • Likes, comments, shares, and retweets: These are individual social media metrics that add up collectively. 
  • Post-engagement rate: This refers to the number of engagements divided by reach or impressions. A high rate indicates the audience that sees the post finds it interesting.
  • The account mentions: If the viewers of your content mention and tag your brand name without prompting, it is a good indicator of healthy brand awareness.

Each social media platform may have different metrics. Looking at a single social media metric will not give an accurate picture. It is important to look at a combination of metrics to determine the efficacy of your social media campaigns. 

Some posts may receive lots of likes but hardly any comments or shares. Often, there is a call to action that asks people to comment and share, and poor performance of these metrics may not be good news. 

High engagement rates indicate overall good audience health as they reflect how responsive your audience is to the content you post.

2. Awareness Metrics 

Regarding tracking awareness, reach, and impression are two important metrics to analyze. These are especially significant if your business goals revolve around brand awareness and image. 

  • Impressions: Impressions measure how often a post appears in someone’s timeline or feed. 
  • Reach: Reach refers to the potential unique audience members a post could have. This usually includes your follower count added to the number of accounts that shared the posts.

While impressions and reach can reveal a lot about the potential your content has to reach current and new audiences, it is still important to take into account other metrics as well. 

If your business is looking to increase awareness and visibility and also educate your audience, then you will have to consider both engagement rates and reach and impressions. 

Social media videos that have high engagement and awareness rates are the ones that likely went viral via shares and retweets.

3. Conversion Metrics 

Conversion metrics are significant if you want to measure how impactful and effective your social media campaigns are.

  • Conversion rate: It is the percentage of visitors who, after clicking a link in your content, took action against the total number of visitors to the same landing page. Taking action could be buying something, downloading an e-book, or subscribing to your newsletter.
  • Click-through rate: It indicates the percentage of users who click on the call-to-action link that has been provided in the social media post.
  • Bounce rate: It is the percentage of page visitors who click on a link in your post but don’t take any action and leave the landing page. 

4. View Count 

View count refers to the total number of times your social media video has been viewed. The view count metric is measured differently across different social media platforms. 

How some major platforms measure a view:

  • YouTube: Someone watches the video for 30 seconds at least.
  • Facebook: Someone views your video for at least 3 seconds.
  • Instagram: Each time a video runs for at least 3 seconds, it is counted as a view. A live video view is counted the moment someone joins the broadcast.
  • Twitter: If the video is played for at least 2 seconds with at least 50% of the video player onscreen, it is counted as a view. 
  • LinkedIn: LinkedIn has the same policy as Twitter.
  • TikTok: It is considered a view as soon as a video starts playing in someone’s feed. 

While some may consider the view count to be an important metric, in reality, it is just a vanity metric. The number of views on your social media videos doesn’t affect your profitability as a business if no other action is taken. 

However, making the first 3-30 seconds of your video extremely engaging is still very important to reel in the viewers.

5. Play Rate 

Your social media videos’ play rate is a significant metric to be analyzed, especially for landing pages with embedded videos.

This is a KPI that tells you how many people deliberately clicked play to watch the video as opposed to those who saw the video simply because they were scrolling and the auto-play was on. Videos can be a powerful tool for promoting your ghost kitchen and engaging with potential customers. 

Clicking on the “play” button requires action. The play rate can be calculated by dividing the total number of people who clicked the play button by the total number of people who accessed the landing page. 

Here are a few easy tips to improve the overall play rate:

  • Create an attention-grabbing thumbnail
  • Experiment with the location of the video on your landing page to improve visibility
  • Include a human face in the thumbnail to make it more appealing to the visitors 

6. Audience Growth Rate 

The audience growth rate is a measure of how many new followers your company or brand gets on social media within a certain timeframe. Instead of taking a simple count of your new followers, this metric measures the new followers as a percentage of your total audience. 

Getting even 10 or 100 new followers can result in a high growth rate for smaller brands. However, bigger brands will need more followers to reach similar figures.

7. Amplification Rate 

The amplification rate indicates the ratio of shares per post against the number of total followers.

The term was coined by author and digital marketing evangelist Avinash Kaushik and referred to “the rate at which your followers take your content and share it through their networks.” 

The higher the amplification rate, the more your followers are expanding your brand’s reach. 

8. Watch Time and Video Completion Rate 

Watch time calculates the total amount of time your videos have been watched. It also includes replays and is added cumulatively. This metric helps to understand whether your target audience resonates with your video content. 

If people register for a longer watch time, they like and enjoy the videos. A shorter watch time means the viewers do not find the video interesting. 

The video completion rate measures the total number of views that go all the way through to the end. Higher video completion rates mean the audience connects with the content and is engaged with the brand. 

The video completion rate is significant to many social media algorithms.

9. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score

CSAT (customer satisfaction score) is analyzed using one simple, straightforward question: how would you rate your overall satisfaction level? It measures how satisfied and happy people are with your product or service.

Many companies ask you to rate your experience after completing your interaction with a customer service agent. This is so that the overall CSAT can be calculated based on different customers’ ratings. 

You can create a single-question survey to ask your customers how satisfied they are with the customer service and tell them to rate you. Also, you can create an auto robot, that asks the same question after the conversation via a virtual call center

10. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net promoter score (NPS) is a metric that analyzes customer loyalty. It is also a good predictor of future customer relationships.

It checks the probability of customers recommending your brand, product, or service to your friends and family.

The customer is usually asked to rate on a scale of zero to ten. Customers who answer 9 or 10 are regarded as “promoters.” People in the 7-8 score range are called “passives,” while those with a lower score are known as “detractors.”

NPS is a unique metric that measures customer satisfaction and potential for future sales.

11. Social Share of Voice (SSoV)

Social share of voice (SSoV) is a measure of the number of people who talk about your company, brand, product, or service on social media as compared to your competitors.

How much of the social conversation among your target audience in the industry you operate is all about you? Mentions of your brand may be direct and tagged or indirect and untagged.

Measuring SSoV is essentially performing a competitive analysis of your brand’s visibility in the market. It is a good indicator of your brand’s relevance to the target audience.

You can calculate your brand’s SSoV by adding up every mention of your company name and brand on social media across various platforms. Now do the same for your competitors and compare the figures to determine the relevance of your brand in the industry.

How to track your Social Media Metrics

Tracking your metrics with Tability

Tracking social media metrics is a game-changer for any marketing manager, and an OKR-tracking platform is the must-have tool to do it right. Social media platforms generate a ton of data, and staying on top of it all can be overwhelming. But with an OKR-tracking platform, you can gather, organize, and visualize all those juicy metrics in one place. No more data scattered across different platforms.

But it's not just about collecting data. An OKR-tracking platform helps you set clear objectives and measurable goals for your social media campaigns. Want to increase engagement rates, reach, or conversion rates? No problem! You can track your progress in real-time, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategy. It's like having a personal coach for your social media game, always pushing you to achieve your best results.

Cherry on top, some tools can even use AI to generate OKRs for you.

Wrapping Up

Since numerous social media video metrics exist, businesses must identify the most relevant ones. Analyzing your social media strategy becomes easier when you know which metrics to track.

After identifying the social media metrics to measure, it is time to track campaign performance. 

Social media campaigns often run across multiple platforms, and measuring their performance is difficult. Working with a professional social media strategist company is a great idea if you are looking to revamp your social media strategy and track the most important metrics for your business.

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Kiran Richards

Content Marketing Specialist, Tability

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