Do you know if your social media marketing strategy is working effectively? Wondering how best to monitor your efforts?
In this article, you’ll discover 10 metrics worth tracking to assess and tweak your social media marketing strategy for your nuclear business.
1: Your Post Type Metrics
Tracking content metrics allows you to analyse the content you share on social media and spot specific patterns. Perhaps 75% of your posts are image-based, and only 25% are video-based. How is that approach working for you?
You can quickly see the breakdown of original content shared vs content created by others, such as an article by nuclear industry experts (where you tag them in your post) or a reshared post a nuclear influencer created for your product.
A variety of other content can also fall into this category, including testimonials, reviews, guest posts, publications, and nuclear industry infographics. Sharing this type of content can help you attract the attention of potential influencers, showcase your expertise, and generate positive views about your nuclear brand.
When tracking your performance, it may be worth creating a spreadsheet. Make sure you add these columns to track the content you share on each of your social media profiles:
Link Posts
Video Posts
Image Posts
Text-Based Posts
Original Content
Other Content
To gather this data, go to your social accounts to see what kind of content you primarily post. You can also use tools like BuzzSumo and Agorapulse to automatically generate a list of how much and what kind of content you share.
2: Your Post Timing Metrics
What times of the day do you post to social media? When is your audience engaging with your content the most? Are you consistent in posting content? Are your posts timely and relevant to your audience?
Tracking timing metrics will help you pinpoint the best times to post your content and help identify gaps you need to fill. For instance, you might decide to start capitalising on trending nuclear news stories or relevant topics within your function or post at different times of the day.
Include these columns in your spreadsheet to track timing metrics for each of your social media profiles:
# of Posts Per Week
Most Common Posting Time
Most Common Posting Day
# of Timely/Seasonal Posts
Most Engaged Audience Time
Most Engaged Audience Day
In your social media insights, you can check what times and days you are posting, look for frequency patterns, and view audience time metrics from your social media accounts.
Numerous studies are also available to help you determine the best days and times to post for specific industries.
3: Audience Metrics
Tracking audience metrics helps you determine whether your target audience is engaging with your content. If your customers are primarily 45- to 55-year-old men who live in Wigan, but your Instagram following is 90% women ages 20–50 from London, you have an audience alignment issue. You are attracting the wrong people with your social media content.
Bots can also be a problem. Other than temporarily increasing your likes or engagement, they don’t do anything for you. If anything, they can do more harm than good. When social media networks discover a large amount of bot engagement with your account, they may penalise you for it.
Tracking your audience data will help you make sure you have the real human followers you want engaging with your content.
In your spreadsheet, include these columns to track audience data for each of your social media profiles:
Total Followers
New Followers
New Accounts You Follow
Male %
Female %
Primary Age Group
Primary Location
Google Analytics Alignment
Here are some tools you can use to analyse your social media audience:
Friends+Me (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest)
Followerwonk (Twitter)
Tailwind (Instagram and Pinterest)
Social media insights (gender and location data)
Google Analytics Audience report > Gender and Location
I included Google Analytics in this list because your social media audience should match the people who visit and convert to your website.
Remember: Know your audience, trace their steps, and make sure the customer you are trying to target is the same one engaging with you everywhere online.
4: Listening Metrics
With social media listening, you go beyond just tracking mentions. Dig deeper into what people are commenting and saying about your brand on social media and measure the sentiments of those conversations (positive, neutral, or negative).
By monitoring and analysing conversations, you can determine how to respond as the brand, and address customer issues or give thanks and praise when needed.
To track social media listening metrics, include these columns in your spreadsheet for each social media profile:
# of Brand Mentions
# of Positive Sentiments
# of Negative Sentiments
# of Neutral Sentiments
Primary Mentioner
Here are some of the best tools to track your brand mentions on the social web:
You can also try to keep up with the conversation manually by following your brand hashtags and @mentions, but keep in mind that not every user includes that info in their posts.
5: Competitor Metrics
Taking a peek at what your competitors are doing on social media can benefit your own social media marketing.
But don’t think of your findings as rules to follow. You don’t know how successful your competitors’ social media efforts contribute to their goals or how these tactics would work for your business. Instead, use the information you glean from your research to generate new ideas, strategies, and tactics to try.
In your spreadsheet, add these columns for each of your social media profiles:
Competitor Strengths
Competitor Weaknesses
New Opportunities
% of Engagement Difference
To check out the competition on social media, follow your competitors’ accounts so you can view their posts as users do and their ads. Note what type of content they’re sharing and whether they’re using any advanced strategies like working with specific influencers.
Tools like Likealyzer, Phlanx, SEMrush, and BuzzSumo can help you get a more in-depth look at the competition.
6: Engagement Metrics
Usually, engagement metrics are the first place businesses look to judge the performance of their social media marketing efforts. However, unless your specific goal is to increase likes, the engagement metric only adds to the overall picture.
To get a good understanding of engagement, add these columns to your spreadsheet for each of your social media profiles:
Total Engagements
# of Individual Engagements by Type (retweets, likes, comments, link clicks, shares, etc.)
Engagement Rate % Increase/Decrease
Mentions Received
DMs/Messages Received
You can find engagement metrics in the backend of your social media page insights and manually count the data, but I don’t recommend that. It’s easier to look at the data collected by social media scheduling tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Agorapulse.
7: Social Traffic Metrics
Is social media one of your top traffic drivers? What’s your bounce rate for social visitors? For example, are visitors leaving your site right away and heading back to Facebook? If so, your social messaging likely isn’t aligned with your website content, in which case, you need to make some adjustments.
Ultimately, you want your social users to take action. Those actions tend to have the most impact on your website, product pages, and form completions. You want to track what’s happening when a social user clicks on a link post and heads to your website. Do visitors fill out your form or click around to multiple pages on your site? Analysing this data can inform your approach to social media link posts.
To monitor social traffic data, add these columns to your spreadsheet for each social media network:
Total Sessions
Total Page Views
Bounce Rate
Pages Per Session
Average Session Duration
Mobile vs Desktop Traffic (like m.Facebook)
Most Common Links Shared on Social Media
A variety of tools will provide social media traffic data. Here are a few you may want to try:
8: Branding Metrics
The importance of branding metrics is to measure how well your social posts align with your brand. Is your brand voice clear and consistent from caption to caption? Do the images you share on your social channels use the same filter or have a similar feel to them? Do your posts use the right brand name?
All brands should have a branding guideline PDF that outlines important branding specifications, such as:
Terminology to Avoid
Company naming (capitalisation and abbreviation policy)
Mission statement to follow
Visual marketing guidelines
Public relations policies
Basic do’s and don’ts
To track branding data, add these columns to your spreadsheet for each social media network: