Followers or subscribers
Keeping an eye on your follower volumes is very important, with the hope of driving an upwards trend, live monitoring of this metric can give an indication of the progress you are making with customer awareness and brand recognition.
Tweets and posts
Quickly seeing where your brand or business is being mentioned can give you the opportunity to react and respond quickly. It can also give you a feel for how your business is being received on social media.
Impressions
Impressions give you data about the exposure your post has seen. It records the views your post has received, regardless of the following interaction taken. It is simply a metric indicating how many people have seen your posts.
Unlinked mentions
Also referred to as fresh mentions, or simply brand mentions, they are a metric of how many mentions of your name, website or other keywords directly associated with your brand that does not directly link the reader to your website.
Reach
Reach is a metric of how many individual people see your content. When it comes to followers and social media, not all followers will see each of your posts, sometimes the percentage that does will be quite small, knowing this figure and its change over time can help you build more engaging content.
Watch time
Watch time is the amount of time in aggregate that a viewer spends watching your content. YouTube refers to this metric as audience retention, increasing this figure is a good indicator that your content is receiving higher overall views.
Engagement
Social media engagement is a catch-all term for any interaction your content receives. This can include likes, shares and comments. Each platform has its own style of interactions that will fall under this metric.
Social media is a great tool and in many cases a really cost-effective way to reach customers and grow your business. However, if you are going to make use of social media then it makes sense to do this to the best of your ability and collecting data and analysing what is happening is the best way to do this.
A social media monitoring dashboard allows you to put visibility of all of the important data in one place – meaning you can see what difference various campaigns make and use this data to perfect future campaign efforts.