Social media is a pretty rough monster to get a hold of when you think about it. You have all of these different opinions from people who are constantly bombarding you for any different reason, and one little screw up can cost you a lot of followers, good will, and more. They say any attention is good attention, but that’s only if you can afford to weather the storm of bad attention – such as if you’re a corporation or more.

For those that aren’t Corporations or big businesses, Social Media is often the basis of all your marketing plans and thus, needs to be monitored carefully to figure out what direction you need to focus your attention on, or figure out what works and what doesn’t. It can be difficult though to gauge interest and how well your marketing plans are going though if you don’t know what to look for.

For starters, gaining followers is a good thing, but followers do not equal engagement, because having eyes on your content doesn’t always necessarily mean clicking or buying. Instead what you want to focus on is a number of different things which can include:

-          Followers: As long as you’re gaining and not losing, it’s a good start to focus on.

-          Reactions: how often are people reacting to your content in a positive way? Heart emoji’s, eye emoji’s, or more?

-          Likes / Shares / Retweets: This ties in to the reactions, but gets more mileage because whatever you’re doing is being spread out on an organic level. It’s not just eyes that are looking at it, but other people are also spreading your brand out.

-          Activity: How many people are actively commenting, liking and sharing, reacting and more? It’s usually pretty suspicious – or the sign of a dying Brand – if you have a lot of subscribers but no activity. You’ll usually want to aim for at least 5% - 10% of subscribers who are eyeing whatever you’re doing.

-          Clicks per Post: This is simply about how many people are actively clicking on your links, either to share content, click your profile, or follow any leads you have.

Of course this isn’t a complete list of things to keep an eye on, as each different Social Media Platform is different from each other. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and more all operate differently, and each of them has different metrics to pay attention to.

Another thing to also keep in mind is that social engagement doesn’t constantly need to be on an upward swing. It’s actually relatively alright to – and perfectly normal – to see downward trends happen. In fact, it’s often normal to see an upward trend on marketing strategies and posts hit a threshold, and then dip back down. The key difference is you’re going to want to see if the next upward trend improves over the previous high, or if it’s trending downward. Measuring your Social Media Engagement is something that should be done over weeks or even over the course of several months, up to a year as long as you’re remaining positive.