How To Quantify Your Library’s Social Media Efforts

Coming up with what to post on your library’s social media platforms consistently is half the battle, the other half is figuring out what works with your audience. For anyone who wants to know where to start with analytics, we’ll list what aspects to focus on when you’re seeing how well content is performing. Through measuring performance of your posts, you’ll be able to quantify your social media efforts!

Engagement

Engagement measures the audience’s interaction with content that you share. This data will show you who is actively engaging with your posts, what types of posts generate the most interest, and how well your content is connecting to your target audience. The metrics that go into calculating engagement are likes, comments, shares, and saves. Therefore, if you see higher than average numbers on any of those metrics, you’ll know that a particular post has high engagement. Free tools like Meta Business Suite can show you the breakdown of those metrics and who is interacting, or you can pay for a service that might pull even more detailed reports.

Loyalty

Loyalty can be measured by your level of support on social media from followers. For instance, if you have a large number of people unfollowing your account, you’ll see that they’re no longer supporting your page. Time spent can also be calculated, showing you how long people typically spend on your page. Existing audience will measure the ratio of new followers reached compared to existing followers reached. This is a great statistic for finding out who of your existing audience is still interested and looking at your posts, and how new followers have been engaged.

Growth

Tracking growth over time can show the progress that your accounts have made since they were created. Unless you’ve made an investment in buying followers, most pages grow organically, which can sometimes be a slow process. Growth can be measured by direct messages and new followers. Organic growth happens by word of mouth, promoting your social media face to face in the library, using the right hashtags or location tags to get in front of people who might not be following, and interacting with other accounts. As long as your follower count is increasing even by just a little bit, that’s great for showing how many people are being drawn to your content.

Conversions

Being in a non-profit space, measuring conversions isn’t as crucial as a retail organization, but it’s still important to consider when gauging effectiveness of your content. Many of your posts might have a call to action like registering for an event or joining a group. Looking at click-through or conversion rates can show you who clicked on a link you shared and how many of those people completed the call to action after clicking. It can also help you finetune your marketing for future events to see if most registrations came from an email blast or a social post.

Reach

Reach gives you an idea of how many people saw your content and how far it went. This includes impressions, which shows how many times a post was in someone’s feed. And traffic, which shows how many people visited your website from social media. Reach measures beyond your followers. It can show you when you’ve used account and location tags or even hashtags wisely to extend past followers and put your posts in front of new people who might be interested in these topics. A post that reaches the most people might not have the highest engagement, but you can at least see that it was viewed by a significant amount of people, even if they didn’t like or comment. Each metric tracks differently, but as long as you’re aware of all five and understand what they each do, you’ll be able to understand how your social media content is performing.