7 Social Media KPIs You Need to Track

Considering the growing importance of social media, it has become increasingly important for business owners to harness its power for various social media campaigns. If you are hired as your company’s social media manager, not only does the responsibility for creating these campaigns fall in your lap, but you will be asked to give account of the success or failures of each of your campaigns. After all, these figures will be used to judge the usefulness of these campaigns and will also be used to decide which campaigns to keep and which to discard. In essence, you will be asked to measure brand awareness, customer regard, and the effect of your social media campaigns on the company’s bottom line. Understandably, every social media manager will have to rely on a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in order to gauge the impact of their social media campaigns. Choosing suitable marketing KPI examples and templates can help make social media campaigns more pointed. Here are seven KPIs that each social media manager should track.

Followers and Likes

One of the easiest data points to measure is how many people have “Liked” or “Followed” your online social media presences. Social media users who have done so are interested in your product or brand and wish to receive updates through their social media timelines. A company that has a social media presence without an adequate number of followers cannot reach the number of potential customers they would like to. However, many may mistakenly call likes and followers a “vanity metric”, saying that they do not really matter and what does truly matter is the impact on the company’s revenue. However, likes and follows are the foundation of your social media presence. Even followers who have yet to make a purchase are important as they tend to amplify your message through continued likes and shares.

Number of Mentions

A social media mention describes when a follower tags a page or twitter handle into a social media post. However, other keywords such as the names of brands, products or services as well as your competitor’s mentions are also included. The number of mentions you receive is a good indicator of the attention your business is attracting through social media. Taking note of mentions will allow your company to monitor the conversation generated by your company, but also gauge the company’s overall reach. Social media managers should have an idea of what their baseline social media presence is so as to accurately measure growth with time. Spikes in the number of mentions should be investigated for positive and negative causes.

Website Traffic

Social media is, of course, not an end onto itself. Understandably one of the indicators of your social media campaign success is the number of people that actually click on the posts and come to the website. Google Analytics is one of the easiest solutions to track your relevant website KPIs since it can let you know which social media platforms are driving the most traffic, convert best and have the highest return on investment. Social media managers will want to examine what visitors to the company’s website do when they visit. Do they browse, or do they go directly to the advertized product? How different are their visits from other visitors not hailing from social media? Understanding these differences could help you examine user needs and your social media strategies.

Sentiment

However an individual feels about a brand, company, product or service, they want to relay these feelings to others. Invariably, social media has become the place to air those feelings. Evaluating sentiment is a valuable method of gauging how individuals feel about your product or service. This can be done either through natural language processing, or by another computational method in order to interpret the meaning. Understandably, this can be a rather time-consuming process. Analytics can then be used to classify sentiment in different ways such as negative or positive while others may choose to sort sentiment according to tone such as Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction or Respect/Disdain. Social media managers will need to calculate the positive impact of the company’s presence by considering the percentage of positive conversations that pop up on a daily basis.

Video Views

One of the easies KPIs to gather is the count on videos shared through social media. View totals will help you to estimate your video’s impact in the social media world especially when there is no clear call to action in the video. The advantages of using video views as a KPI is that the stats are readily available and digestible. However, if your video does feature a call to action at the end, you will need more than just the view total to estimate its impact on viewers. Social media users do not view video advertisements by accident. Therefore, if they make the decision to watch your video, they are showing an interest in what you have to say.

Conversions

A conversion refers to a positive action taken by a visitor to your website. While there is a tendency to believe that conversions are comprised entirely of purchases, this is not true. Conversions can also come in the form of webinar registrations, signing up for a newsletter and content downloads. Studying conversions from social media can help you to evaluate the effectiveness of your message. If your targets find your message to be relevant, this would be reflected in your conversion rates. However, social media managers will first want to establish benchmarks before analyzing conversion data.

Customer Lifetime Value

When businesses acquire a new customer, they want to know how long that customer will continue to make purchases from them. This is especially true when you remember that social media marketing is all about establishing a relationship with the customer. It is understandable, therefore, when some social media managers are reluctant to consider new-customer acquisition to me the most telling of KPIs. Social media presents a unique opportunity to strengthen the relationships between the company and existing customers. For this reason it’s easier to convert on existing customers rather than new ones.  The customer lifetime value is a way of forecasting how much revenue a customer will bring to a company over time. The company would need to calculate a customer’s average value per transaction and the average number of transactions per week.

For a social media campaign to be effective, it must have checks and balances. There must be ways to adjudicate whether it’s worth keeping or not. Luckily, these seven metrics can help social media managers to gauge the efficacy of their campaigns.