How well is your audience interacting with your content?  The answer to this question will separate the novice social media promoters with the pros.  The good news is, it doesn’t take 10,000 hours to become a pro in tracking your engagement.  Use social media engagement metrics to enable a deeper understanding of what motivates your audience, and to determine how well your campaign is resonating with high-value readers and listeners. 

Because there are so many engagement metrics to track, chances are that if you are a beginner to social media, with enough practice you will begin to see yourself as a winner in at least one of these metrics.  With one win at a time, especially in the early days, you can find further motivation to keep tracking and keep improving your scores over time. 

Here are some common engagement metrics with a description as to how you can benefit from them. 

Likes

• The most basic of all, and the higher number the better
• What They Indicate: Likes and reactions (such as “love,” “wow,” “sad,” etc.) indicates a positive (or negative) reaction.  More complex or sophisticated applications enable the audience to choose more than just a like, but also emojis for “love,” “wow,” and “sad” among others.  It is the easiest and most rudimentary way a viewer can react, so not having any “likes” is like putting your audience to sleep. 
• What to Learn: Content with many likes and reactions lets you know which types of content get the most attention, and with that, you have a basis for replication of future content generation. 

Comments

• A deeper form of engagement, where the audience is so strongly interested in your posting that they set themselves apart (to show that you have their attention?) by creating new original content in response to your new original content.
• What They Indicate: Comments show that your posting sparked interest.  Even if you get trolls, you can have the satisfaction that someone bothered to post some nonsense, because they thought their own version of bad taste would be seen by others. 
• What to Learn: Read the comments and comment back – that is the most effective way to show users that you care about them and want to learn from them.  With a deeper understanding of their sentiments made available through comments and feedback, you can use that to generate more meaningful content in the future, and in doing so, begin the virtuous cycle of interest among your readers, reflected by the interest you have shown them. 

Shares and Retweets

• Shares and retweets are likes and comments, but turned up a notch.  Shares can amplify your reach and introduce your platform to new potential followers.
• What They Indicate: More than just a comment, a share indicates that your audience is identifying themselves with you.  A share of a posting means you have become and identity-maker.  This step is a giant leap towards a full-on branding strategy.
• What to Learn: As always, count the shares to see which comments resonate most you’re your audience.  Go a step further and analyze what type of messaging, visuals, or information prompted users to share.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

• CTR measures the percentage of people who clicked on a link in your post.  Are you getting any genuine action from your audience?  What percentage of your audience is entering your universe?  
• What It Indicates: CTR shows the effectiveness of your call-to-action.
• What to Learn: A high CTR indicates that your content was compelling enough to drive traffic. Analyze the content and its placement to understand what encouraged users to click through. As with any indicator of success, adjust your content strategy based on these findings.

Engagement Rate

• Engagement rate is a combination of likes, comments, shares, and clicks relative to your total number of followers.
• What It Indicates: While it is one thing to have likes, if you are reaching the next level in your engagement effectiveness, you will come to learn that certain customers (or readers, or viewers) will be engaging with you more than once and in multiple ways.  This is your bullseye target audience.  All the lessons you aim to learn from simple metrics such as clicks and likes are now compounded in complexity and, along with that, potential benefits to your future promotional designs. 
• What to Learn: Similar to the other metrics, you can compare the engagement rates of different posts to identify which types of content perform better. Beyond that, you can begin to piece together certain character traits of your audience.  “People who wrote these types of comments also had a higher CTR, therefore that is the kind of person I’m trying to appeal to.”  Write your own version of that sentence, but with specifics to show for it. 

Mentions and Tags

• Being mentioned or tagged by users means they’re actively involving your brand in their conversations or content.
• What They Indicate: This metric tracking indicates an advanced level of identity on the part of your audience, and may indicate that your audience as a whole is growing more sophisticated.  Your reach is now extending beyond simple impressions or single individuals, you are being remembered in other peoples’ conversations. 
• What to Learn: Monitor mentions to identify opportunities for engagement. Respond to mentions promptly, whether they’re positive or negative, as de facto feedback on your brand, your product, your service and your message.  Target new groups that were not previously on your radar.  Learn from the type of people who mention your brand, and look out for potential surprises – audience types which resonate with your messaging, but you didn’t expect.  What is making them interested?  Acknowledging and engaging with user-generated content can build and foster a greater sense of community around your brand.

Follower Growth Rate

• Follower growth rate measures how quickly your follower count is increasing.
• What It Indicates:  a metric for more well-developed and mature campaigns, it is another dimension of likes (which could gradually increase over time) and the audience’s enthusiasm over your content (how many likes in a short period of time). 
• What to Learn: If your campaign coincides with a significant increase in followers, analyze the content you posted during that period. Determine if there’s a correlation between the campaign content and the growth in followers, and if your determination is that there is a positive relationship, then push that theme like crazy.  At some point, you may experience the thrill of a single posting that, at least in a small way, has gone viral.  You may not be able to replicate this phenomenon on a weekly basis (but you can try), nonetheless, learn what you can and try to identify the ideas you conveyed which so well resonated with your audience. 

Time of Engagement

• Analyze when your posts receive the most engagement by studying time-of-day and day-of-week patterns.
• What It Indicates:  This is a tactic for the pros, but essential when your promotional efforts are building a large following.  At this stage in the game, you will be trying to improve your skills not by factors of 5 or 10, but by 10% or 20%.  When you have a large audience, a mere few percentage points can make a significant difference in the volume of revenue (and profit) that you take in from a single post. 
• What to Learn: Let every word be leveraged to is max!  Optimize your posting schedule and tailor your content to be available when your audience is most open to your messaging.

By closely monitoring and analyzing these engagement metrics, you can gain valuable insights into what content resonates with your audience, which strategies are effective, and how to improve your future social media campaigns. Adjust your approach based on what you learn to continually refine and optimize your social media marketing efforts.