It’s the era of Social media and its now proven that this platform is the most effective marketing medium for any product or services to reach to its ultimate customers. As Social media gives you a strong virtual market with a huge crowd as your prospective buyer it’s also important to understand that if you focus on the wrong priorities then surely your brand is going to sink. In such scenario today there are many marketers who constantly monitor their Facebook followers, retweets and posts on various other social media networks but beyond this there are also other key metrics that are much more important to focus on which normally is left out by many people. If you do not concentrate on these metrics then surely it’s going to take a toll in your ability to drive performance results from social media marketing. Its not always necessary that your social share will provide you with all the information you require to access the effectiveness of your campaign. Some of the reasons for this is that many social media shares actually come from bots which cannot be taken as genuine thoughts or expressions from humans. It is also not always necessary that the social shares always come from your target customers and there is absolutely no guarantee about the assurance that social shares always come from people who think positive about your brand.Hence as mentioned though Social Media like Facebook and Twitter may provide you with some interesting information there is much more to be tracked in terms of the essential metrics which will give you a better picture of the impact of your social media implementations. All social media campaigns will have a primarily agenda of boosting customer engagements and also to maximize brand awareness but today just by monitoring social media share sand follower counts will only tell you a part of the whole story but you need to understand the following metrics also to get a valuable insight.

1. The search volume of a Brand : It’s a genuine trend now on social media that customers who are exposed to a brand on this platform are more than 180 percent likely to search that specific brands on search engines. Hence from this its very clear that the search volume for brand terms becomes a very important metric in analyzing the behavior of customers. You can use tools like Google Insights and Google Trends which are very effective in comparing changes in search volumes for your specific brands with that of your competitors volumes.
2. Understanding your Brand Sentiments : Understanding how your brand is perceived by your social media audience is strategically very important and has to be dealt with a proper plan. Its not necessary that all publicity is good publicity as there are so many people who may be negative thoughts and things to say about your brand. Hence we need to measure the sentiments of the conversations which surround our brand online and monitor it continuously. There should be a proper in house plan as too what will be the official responses to negative brand mentions and also re-compensations the company is ready to offer to the customers.
3. Whats your Lead Growth : Aggregate data such as number of social followers and mentions can give you an overall indication of brand awareness and targeted leads to your website instead an attribution program can tell you whether a social media campaign results in positive leads or conversion growth. With such data you not only get to know how your social campaigns are performing and if they are effective in yielding returns on investments but it will also give you an idea of how to better allocate your social activities and marketing resources.
4. Your Inbound Links : This is the best and most essential ranking factor for Google and also it helps in measuring overall popularity of the contents of your website. Identify surges on your website traffic when you have volumes of inbound links coming to your site when you run a contest or any specific piece of content or even many other social media marketing strategy.

Social Media has become the stage for many companies to market and reach to their prospects. But its also important to measure follower engagements and brand awareness as this is a very crucial part of social media optimization. But the problem here is that measuring the effectiveness of your social media strategy becomes sometimes very difficult as interpretations are highly subjective. Hence if you want to measure the impact of your social media strategies then tracking the right metrics becomes a key factor.