Rap Metrics 101 (Original Publish Date June 30, 2020)

From an independent rap artist perspective, keeping up with follower counts and post engagement percentages is just a wade of confusion and, quite frankly, can feel like a waste of time.

How can an independent artist track metrics? Is this important for an artist to have on their radar? This blog will walk you through the essential metrics every rap artist should pay attention to based on their goals. We will go over what social media metrics are, why they are essential, how to find them and which ones you should be paying attention to. Specifics you track will vary by industry, type of music, and campaigns. Consider this the foundation to build your approach to social media analytics.

What are social media metrics, and why should you track them?

Your social media goals are what determine your metrics. For every purpose, you need a related metric, which will help you determine if your social media strategy is meeting your expectations or not.

Let us say your goal is to increase conversions for your newest single. Therefore, your social media goal becomes increasing conversions from those that visit your website via posts that are part of your strategy. Now that you have your goal, you can determine the appropriate metrics and a time to measure them.

Example:

Your goal is to increase your conversions from social media by 20% in three months. To meet this goal, you decide to run a campaign that will include ads, product tags, and influencers. To measure your efforts, you determine that you will look at the social traffic and conversion rate metric from posts in your website analytics.

Ultimately, social media metrics are important because they can measure a campaign's success. Social media metrics showcase how healthy a social media strategy is performing and if you will impact your overall music business. Metrics allow you to showcase the result of your work to executives.

Metrics provides marketing consultants with consistent social media metric reports to help lead to significant shifts for your social media campaign, including:

1. Increased budget

2. Increased access to resources

Measuring the right social media metrics

Every social media has analytics for you to look over.

1. Facebook: found in the insights tab (for business profiles only)

2. Twitter: they have their webpage.

3. Instagram: You also need a business account with 100 followers before you can see your data.

To minimize time invested in pulling metrics from all these sources, I recommend finding social media analytic tools such as:

1. Hootsuite

2. Buffer

3. Social Sprout

The time you save manually creating reports and pulling together different networks will make up for the money you spend on these tools. Some offer a free plan, but you are limited to the number of channels you manage.