Last Updated on June 8, 2020

With so much emphasis on influencer marketing these days, it can be very exciting for anyone online to attract businesses and brands through his or her following. You could get all kinds of free products and even get paid. It’ll take a little time if you’re new to social media marketing, but you can speed up the process by narrowing down your goals and tracking your progress. Let’s go over the important basics on measuring social media influence so you never feel lost on how to grow your influencer name.

1. Traffic

The simplest way to measure social media influence is by seeing how much attention you’re getting through your posts. Traffic is simply visits to a website. If your goal is to get people who see you on social media to visit your website, then you would want to track website visits that came through social media with Google Analytics.

You’ll want to judge more than just raw numbers, though. You might have 1,000 people coming to your website on average every month, but what portion of that is social? If you have a large following and can also show that a significant portion of your website traffic is from social media, brands will want to make a marketing deal with you.

2. Click-through Rate

Click-through rate, or CTR, is the ratio of people who saw a certain piece of content with a link and clicked on it, versus the total number of people who saw it. CTR will help you gauge how much your audience is interested in certain things you post, but it’s best used to track any social posts that link to gated content.

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For example, let’s suppose you have an email list through which you send a newsletter to subscribers, and you often use social posts to direct to a page where you ask people to sign up to that list. CTR on all links going to that sign-up page will help you figure out the types of content that inspire people to click and see the page.

3. Bounce Rate

A bounce is when a person lands on a webpage and then clicks the back button soon after, without interacting at all. Bounce rate is critical because it can tell you what parts of your social content or website annoy people. If you have a high bounce rate, there may also be a case of mixed messages. If a person sees an interesting social post with a happy, excited tone, but then clicks a link and goes to a drab, serious webpage, that difference in tone might cause them to back out.

If you have any issues with a high bounce rate, your page might not be delivering on the expectations you set with the content linking to it. People will jump away at the first sign that something isn’t right, so consider having a neutral party look at your site and tell you their impressions.

4. Engagement

Engagement is a little bit harder to quantify, given there are so many shapes it can take. Engagement involves someone doing something, usually other than clicking a link, and that can take the form of, among other things:

  • Likes, favorites, etc.
  • Comments or replies.
  • Mentions.
  • Participation in hashtags.

Engagement shouldn’t just be quantified as a number, however. It also pays to think about what sort of engagement you’re getting and whether that speaks to the kind of character you want to present.

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In general, influencers should have some degree of the three following traits.

  • Trusted: Influencers should inspire confidence in anything they say or recommend. A trusted influencer inspires thankfulness, dedication to a cause, or some other genuinely positive attribute.
  • Knowledgeable: An influencer, if possible, should be seen as an authority on a certain topic, whether through knowledge, skill, or study in a field.
  • Liked: Influencers should actually use social media authentically so that some part of their following sees them as friends, or at least charming acquaintances. Rather than through trust or knowledge, some fans only engage with an influencer and follow his or her recommendations if they like his or her as a person.

Create a strategy that highlights the character traits you want to shine, and then judge your engagement numbers based upon that model. For instance, an academic influencer with a Ph.D. may have a suave personality and be well-liked when he or she opens up to people, but he or she needs to be seen as knowledgeable as well, or else relevant brands that want a knowledgeable influencer are less likely to take an interest in him or her.

Social media influence measurement mostly breaks down into traffic, clicks versus bounces, and engagement. There are all sorts of tools, free or paid, that can help you measure your social media influence and find ways to improve. As you grow and attract more passionate followers, bigger and higher-paying brands will take an interest in you and even pitch their influencer marketing agreements directly to you! It’s not only possible, but organized and simplified through the Intellifluence platform. You can join Intellifluence for free as an influencer if you’d like to be more visible to the brands that need you most.