Social Media Metrics To Help You Grow

We used to talk about reach a lot and how important it was to reach as many individuals as possible with our content. This is still true but retention is now one of the most important social media metrics to track.

What is retention and why does it matter? Retention is a metric that measures how well you keep your audience’s attention or how much of your video was watched by your audience. It is often measured in percentage, and it can be represented with a downward curve like the one in the image below.

The longer you can keep your audience’s attention, the more social media platforms like it. Why? Because the longer you watch a video or spend time watching a story for example, the longer you stay on their platform...and the longer you stay on these social media platforms, the more they can show you ads 😉

If social media platforms reward content with higher retention rates, how can you make sure to capture & retain your audience’s attention?

Start by capturing your audience’s attention with a hook.

A hook is an element at the beginning of your video that grabs attention and makes the viewer want to watch more. It “hooks” them in. The hook usually needs to be within the first 3-5 seconds of a video. There are many different hooks that you can use but it doesn’t mean that all of these hooks can work for your business. Here are a few examples of hooks:

• something falling

• a catchy or popular song

• big text on top of the video

• talking really fast to share as much information as possible in very little time

• asking a question but not answering it right away

Once you have captured your audience’s attention, it’s all about retaining attention. How can you provide enough value or create intrigue to keep your audience watching your video until the end?

Average watch time or average view time is the metric used to measure the portion of the video that has been watched. This is also another metric that social media platforms consider when evaluating your content.

When we group these metrics together, we have retention and average watch time that can teach us a lot about what resonates with our audience. For example, if you notice that one of your recent videos has the best average watch time, ask yourself why? What made my audience want to watch a longer portion of this specific video?

These insights can be helpful when trying to understand what works and what doesn’t with your content. Ultimately, we want to share content that our audience is interested in, not only to keep them on the platform longer but also to keep them as followers or convince them to follow us :)

There is so much more that can be said about retention and how to capture attention on social media. More to come in the next weeks!