What kind of social media metrics do you need to prioritize for your influencer campaign?
The best thing about digital campaigns is that your results are quantifiable and numbers don’t lie! But, it is also very important to understand what those numbers mean and how you can use that data for future campaigns.
Impressions are the number of eyeballs reaching a post and one user can contribute to more than one impression. Although it’s great to have a high number of impressions, it does not determine the performance of your posting. However, it could mean that the content is captivating enough for audiences to return to it. Reach, on the other hand, is the number of users or accounts that viewed your content, where one user can only contribute to one unique reach and no more than that. These two metrics are important for awareness campaigns, because the higher the number of impressions & reach, the wider the campaign message has extended.
The industry benchmark for awareness campaigns are 10% out of the total potential reach. For example, the potential reach is 1,000,000 so the benchmark should be 100,000 impressions. This benchmark allows us to estimate the success of the campaign and determine whether the communication direction was effective enough to meet the campaign objectives.
As for engagement metrics, you should look at comments, saves, shares, IG story replies, sticker taps, link clicks and even views for video postings. The industry benchmark for engagement rate is generally 1% – 5%. The engagement rate can be calculated by dividing the total engagement with the potential reach, multiplied with 100. This is an important metric for a campaign to determine how people are participating in the conversation about your campaign and how people are sharing and engaging with the content.
If you want your audiences to engage with the postings then you need to give them a reason to, by creating content that is engaging and is not just one way communication. It is always important to give audiences an incentive to interact.
Before a campaign is launched, you have to know what sort of outcome you want to achieve from your campaign. Are you looking for the campaign’s messaging to reach as many people as possible? Or do you want audiences to comment on the campaign’s content? Or is it conversion that you are looking for?
At the end of the day, a successful campaign is subjective to each brand and it’s up to you to set your own benchmark.
