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For many entrepreneurs, social media is a double-edged sword. While platforms like X (or Twitter) offer potential for valuable connections, knowledge and entertainment, they also become a significant distraction and time sink for many of us.
For professionals, you want to make sure the content you're posting benefits users and reinforces your social media presence. But finding ways to quantify it and use it to make decisions moving forward may not be obvious.
Anyone faced with these challenges needs tools to ensure that the time spent at X is beneficial to their life and business. Having high-quality metrics can allow you to constantly measure your audience's engagement with that content.
Why trace the value of X?
We all know that social media in general and X in particular gives you the opportunity to present content to millions of people. But extracting value from X requires a strategy. Tracking the performance and behavioral metrics of my X account can give me actionable data about the reach of my X content and the level of engagement from both my followers and X users in general.
Following the value of X can also increase the visibility of your business and brand by giving you metrics you can use to increase the number of followers on your feed, which can also help you drive those followers to your other channels, be it websites or other social media. channels.
By analyzing your X metric audiencelike trending hashtags, can help you stay up-to-date on trends that you can use to drive traffic to your X presence. Finally, learning which users are using X effectively can help you lead straight effectors in your industry who can help grow your brand.
The best metrics you can use to track the value of X
Metrics are important because they can answer questions like “How popular is the information I'm putting on X?” or “Am I putting too much or not enough content in my feed?” and give you numerical values that you can use to make decisions. Some of these metrics are readily available. Some require a deeper dive or the use of X's Analytics suite to find out.
Gaining followers
The total number of followers an account has is an almost ubiquitous statistic. Whenever you hear about a celebrity in an entertainment-related story, the number of social media followers they have often follows.
If I have a rapid increase in followers, this may mean that an individual tweet resonated with my audience, while a slow steady increase in followers it can mean that my content has a wide appeal and that the content is being shared with others.
Link clicks
Link click metrics measure the number of times users click on URLs found in your tweets. If you regularly provide links to external content in your tweets, this is another metric that is very useful for evaluating what content resonates with users.
This can also be helpful when you are trying direct traffic on your website. Correlating link clicks from X as well as other channels (Facebook, email, etc.) with how long users stay engaged with content on your website can help determine which channels drive the most traffic to your site.
Conversion rate
Conversions measure the impact of a post on a user's action. This action could be going to a website to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or download a file. Metrics like these can also help identify areas for improvement. For example, if a post drives traffic to a form, but users don't fill it out or abandon it before hitting submit, then the posts are effective, but the form may need optimization.
engagement
The engagement rate takes a bit of math to calculate. Engagement rate measures the impact of your posts by dividing the total number of engagements (comments, reposts, likes, etc.) by the number of views. A higher engagement rate indicates that your content elicits a response from your audience. A lower engagement rate could mean they read your posts and then move on.
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IMPRESSIONS
If your post appears on someone else's timeline, that's an impression. Two important things to note about impressions: They don't necessarily mean interaction with the post, as simply viewing a post counts as an impression. Also, multiple views from the same user count as multiple impressions.
MILESTONE
Unlike impressions, reach counts unique views from different users. If a user sees one of my posts seven times and another user sees it twice, my reach will appear as two.
Think of impressions as a snapshot of how many times your posts are shown to users. In contrast, reach shows how many people you are reaching. Both metrics combined can give you a better understanding of how your X strategy is performing.
Why does this matter long term?
Having a decision-making strategy built around metric X can benefit your business in several ways beyond just increasing the number of followers you have.
1. You can evaluate long-term performance
Identifying posts that perform well over time can distinguish content that your audience identifies with. Supplying your audience with similar content in the future can optimize your X stream with more consistently high-value content.
2. It helps you understand your audience
X's analytics package offers more to your audience than just your username. You can get information about followers' interests, geographic location, language they speak, and the time of day their activity level is at its peak. When you tailor your content to your audience's preferences, it leads to more frequent and positive engagement.
3. You gain better control of your content strategy
Quality content isn't just a matter of what to post. When to post and how often are also considerations as X feeds are constantly updated. You want to make sure you're posting quality content when your audience is most active on X.
If you don't post enough content, users may look elsewhere for the content they want, or they may simply be shown someone else's material. If you post too much, you can overwhelm your audience with noise that will drive them to other sources as well. Engagement analytics will show when your users are most active and want your content. Focus on posting at these moments.
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Increase in value over time
As you use X strategically, you may notice that the percentage of valuable experiences on the platform increases over time. By refining your feed and analyzing audience interactions with your content, you can increase the value your audience and business derive from X.
As you improve your analysis, your X network expands, exposing you to an ever-growing pool of knowledge and opportunities. This snowball value effect shows that the strategic use of metric X can become increasingly useful for you and your company.