7 Powerful Metrics to Track to Engage Your Online Community

As a brand or page owner, each social media platform shows you some of your metrics – everyone knows that. But if you want to gain a truly deep level of insight, you should extend your knowledge beyond that by utilizing social listening and text analysis. This will allow you to learn from trends and competitors’ activity as well.

There’s an uncomfortable truth that many brands and content creators must face sooner or later: simply having lots of followers doesn’t amount to much. You have to get them to interact with your content, your page, and eventually, your products, in order to turn them into customers and run a successful business.

In other words, you must engage them. Engagement is usually measured through likes/reactions, comments, shares/retweets, and the number of views in case of video content.

While being aware of these is a hundred percent necessary, there is actually way more to discover and learn from in the online world, that your Facebook and Instagram page or YouTube channel statistics can’t and won’t reveal.

Even though many go by the popular notion of ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity,’ in the age of cancel culture, perhaps one would argue with the truth of that. We certainly do.

When you engage your community and potential customers, it is best to create rather positive impressions and track them. That’s why, when it comes to engagement and maintaining a good online reputation, both small and large enterprises (and the brands belonging to them) can benefit from social listening.

Manually searching for mentions and related content is in the past: the modern media analysis tools automatically find every piece of online content that mentions your product, brand, or company. They give you much more insight than simple page metrics. With their help, you are provided with a broad and clear view of how you and your competitors appear on the world wide web, and what your potential customers and fans think and, more importantly, expect.

Some of the insights they give are similar to what you have to track for influencer marketing attributions, but the best social listening tools can do even more. They don’t only list relevant content though, they also analyze the text for you, which spares you hours and hours of reading through articles and comments.

Social listening today goes hand in hand with artificial intelligence, which nowadays often parallels human precision when it comes to understanding text. However, software equipped with artificial intelligence is much better at repetitive tasks than humans and doesn’t get tired even after reading ten thousand comments. This gives you consistency in your data.

Let’s see what kind of metrics and insight that the joined forces of social listening and humanly precise text analysis can reveal for you.

It might sound like an obvious thing, but are you aware of how much people are talking about you online? The sheer knowledge of which days brought exceptionally high or low mention numbers reveals a lot about whether people are engaged with your content or not – and this includes news sites and forums, not only your social media pages.

Find out which posts and events generated huge buzz and why. Keep in mind these insights when creating new content for your audience to provide them with what they really like.

Source: Neticle

Do you know who always comments on and shares your content? Or who runs blog-olds, news sites, or social media pages related to your topic or field? Once you learn who they are, you can reward their loyalty or invite them to collaborate. Hopefully, you’ll be able to turn them into long-term promoters.

It might even be useful to know the opinion leaders in your niche if you’re planning to place advertisements on sites. Or, if they disagree with your views, you can learn from that too. Is there something you could do better?

You can even publicly address the differences and turn the whole thing into a positive experience, or an insightful debate for your community. All of these can be highly intriguing and engaging for them.

Are your customers and community members generally happy, sad, angry, or excited about what’s going on on your pages and in your media appearances? Text analysis reveals key emotions, and should also be able to tell you about the positivity and negativity that has appeared in your mentions. 

What is the share of different sentiments?

Source: Neticle

What topics are users and media generally making positive comments on, and what is it that they dislike?

You can follow the changes day-by-day, and take notice of what has worked and what hasn’t. Try and create more content that has made your followers happy in the past, so that they will flock to your site next time as well.

In theory, we all know that we are all connected by the internet, but it can still be fascinating to see how quickly and how far news travel in the online space. Have you ever wondered how many people your content has reached? 

News sites often have a huge readership and online shares and retweets spread the word faster than lightning. Awareness of this matters because it opens the possibility of engaging a wide group of people who aren’t your followers yet.

This chart shows the daily number of users potentially reached on the web.Source: Neticle

A great social listening tool will give you a very close estimate of how many people the content mentioning your brand has reached on any given day. What type of content prompted people to share it, beyond your existing fanbase? 

Also, the reach can be broken down by platform as well, so that you can see where your influence and reputation are the strongest and where it needs further support. This can be important information when planning a campaign or placing sponsored posts.

Besides sentiment analysis, the other important stronghold of text analytics is topic analysis. Especially if you have a large brand, the task of reading through comments and content mentioning you becomes gargantuan.

Yet you cannot neglect it: knowing what your online community thinks is your bread and butter. What did they talk about and how often? Were these topics mentioned in a positive or negative context?

Source: Neticle

Find out what they are, what sentiments they contain, so that you can react and post more content related to them. You can be sure to engage your community with such content if it was already what they were talking about. Additionally, if a topic that is crucial to your brand appears in a negative light, you’ll be able to dig deeper and find out why.

You need to understand which posts perform best: the ones that receive the highest engagement in the classical sense of the word (likes/comments/shares). Your social media pages will show you these on your own platforms, however, a social listening tool will collect them from all across the web.

Some software can also break these down by the type of interaction, so that you will know exactly which posts users only liked, and which ones made them more active in the form of comments (might mean heated debates) and shares (often super valuable as we’ve seen with reach).

If you pay close attention, you’ll be able to form a much better content creation strategy and provide your community with posts that surely no user will be able to idly scroll by.

Not only can you discover the most successful posts, but also reveal trends in engagement. Besides the key topics that received high mention numbers, topics with high engagement mean those ones that collected the highest interaction numbers. This will give you yet another helping hand when planning what to post, like general pointers towards the direction you should go.

Source: Neticle

If you’ve found the list above helpful, let us give you yet another nudge. All of these metrics can be monitored for your competitors as well. If there is someone whose online performance you admire or a brand that you compete with, perhaps it’s worth following their activity closely. How do they engage with their followers, what strategy have they implemented? Learn from what they do well, but also draw conclusions from their missteps.

You can spare yourself from making many mistakes. For example, if you’ve seen that your competitor’s audience didn’t appreciate it when they mixed political messages into their campaign, perhaps you can refrain from that approach. 

On the other hand, if your competitor’s campaign has had huge success, you have two paths to choose from. You can either try something similar — but make sure the messages don’t feel overused and add your own twist to them. Or, if that doesn’t feel right to you, the other sensible path to take is to choose entirely new topics so that your content feels more unique and original.

Like we’ve seen with the metrics above, it’s also possible to detect general feedback on a brand on the web, not just directly below a brand’s posts. Often, blog-olds will report on issues, or users will post it on their own social media feeds that they had problems with a product or a negative store experience. You can reach out to them to try your products instead, or at the very least, pay attention to the mentioned factors when you’re planning your next campaign or product launch.

Either way, know that there is a whole new world beyond the gender breakdown of your followers and the number of likes under your Instagram posts.