So your business is on Twitter, Facebook and a host of other platforms, which is great, but now what? To make social media work for you, it pays to understand which success benchmarks can reveal whether your efforts are working or not.

To follow are some key ones to keep your eyes on and some insights into using them:

Conversion

Simply put, conversion happens when someone does what you want. Typically this means buying your product or service. If you have 3,000 friends and followers and 65 buy your product in a week, your conversion rate is 2.2% (65 ÷ 3,000). Knowing your conversion rate will give you a basis for comparison in following weeks, which is useful in determining if your social strategy is working.

Insight: Buying isn’t the only conversion goal you can measure. Conversion can mean signing up for an email list, joining a loyalty club, referring a friend or some other goal that’s important to your business. To House of Blues Entertainment, conversion meant filling a venue that seldom sold out for some particular artists. For a case study on how they succeeded using Instagram, click here.

Audience Growth Rate

Audience Growth Rate is a simple comparison of the number of fans, followers, etc. your business has today vs. any time in the past. If you have 10,000 audience members now and you had 9,500 last month, your growth rate for the month is 500.

Insight: While this is a fairly straightforward metric, it pays to consider that social media as a whole continues to grow a larger audience at an incredibly brisk pace. In fact, according to Smart Insights, the percentage of U.S. citizens using social media has grown from 7% to 65% in the last decade and continues to grow. This means an ever-expanding potential audience for your business.

Bounce Rate

The percentage of those who visit your page and promptly leave is your bounce rate. If your bounce rate is high, you might consider retooling your content to make posts more interesting or visuals more engaging. Closely related is ‘exit rate,’ the percentage of people who leave your site from a given page.

Insight: Visitors can bounce or exit a variety of ways, including hitting the back button, timing out, clicking an external link or typing in a different url. Regardless of how they leave, once they’re gone it’s difficult to get them back. To keep them from leaving, consider these helpful tips from Qualaroo.

Making the most of social media means understanding the metrics behind it. For more insights into social media benchmarking for your business, check out this piece by buffer social.