Social Media KPIs to Measure Brand Awareness

Measuring growth is one of the most critical components for most marketing objectives. This includes a healthy social media strategy. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) make working towards and achieving milestones more possible. They force you to quantify what success looks like, giving you the ultimate benchmark for a project’s or department’s impact. Additionally, social media KPIs will help you identify where your focus should be. This way, you’re not just pouring resources into tasks that have little or no relevance to your overarching vision

By compelling you to define your goals, these metrics give you the guardrails you need to formulate an appropriate action plan. With the right KPIs, your team can develop a growth strategy that aligns with your organization’s primary mission. Better yet, it’ll be measurable!  

Read more: How to Manage Your Online Reputation with Social Media Metric Tracking

Another benefit of having a clear set of KPIs is improved internal communications. Social media metrics can get confusing, especially if other departments aren’t very familiar with them. By clearly outlining your KPIs for brand awareness and other objectives, you’ll be able to communicate quickly with other marketing directors and strategists. As a result, they can get timely updates on your performance. This ensures that team members at every level understand the impact of your work.  

But with so many potential goals to explore, knowing what to concentrate on can be a challenge. In this post, we’ll look at some of the most important stats you should be tracking and why.  

Why is it Important to Set KPIs?  

Social media is an extremely valuable tool for building authentic relationships and communicating with your online audience. It establishes trust, loyalty, and engagement and helps promote your company’s products or services in a tangible and effective way.  

But in order to extract the highest amount of value possible from your social media strategy, you need a way to set, measure, and understand its performance process.  

That’s where KPIs, including brand awareness KPIs, come in.  

KPIs provide a transparent performance measurement system that enables your team to gauge its effectiveness and see what needs to change. Strong KPIs, such as paid social media KPIs, benefit your entire organization by clarifying its present position and outlining clear objectives for the future.  

13 Social Media KPIs Everyone Should Be Tracking  

In the dizzying landscape of social media, consumers’ attention spans are about as precious as gold. But what good is their attention if they’re not acting on it? You will constantly be toeing the line between awareness, reach, and conversions.  

Yes, captivating your audience is crucial. But that’s the first step in the process. You need to support it by building engagement, eventually feeding into conversions. Your social media mix needs to service the entire sales funnel, and that’s where your KPI focus should start.   

These 13 KPIs represent the primary metrics for measuring the efficacy of your company’s social media strategy. They account for every step of the consumer journey while giving you that all-important umbrella performance and channel health.   

1. Engagement Rate 

Tracking engagement metrics is essential in social media marketing. The number of likes, comments, saves, and shares per post offers valuable insight into how consumers perceive your content.  

But another engagement metric that often gets ignored is the applause rate. Applause rates measure exclusively positive engagements, such as heart reactions, saves, and favoriting a post. After all, a high volume of reactions isn’t always a good thing. Remember to differentiate between the two. 

While it’s beneficial to understand engagement overall, it’s also worth doing a qualitative deep-dive monthly. That way, you can unpack the comments, giving you a more comprehensive indication of audience sentiment. 

2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)  

Your brand’s CTR, often regarded as a key metric among paid social KPIs, represents the number of times people clicked on a call-to-action link or button. If your CTR is high, it means that your marketing messaging and call-to-actions are effective. Ultimately, it indicates whether your work prompts consumers to take the desired action. CTR can refer to a range of other metrics, including conversion rates, website visits, and purchases.  

3. Profile Visits 

As the name suggests, this KPI tracks how many consumers visit your profile over an established period of time. The higher it is, the stronger your online presence is likely to be. It’s worth looking at this in conjunction with traffic to the site, especially if you’re running specific awareness or reach campaigns.  

This metric is platform-specific. For instance, if you’re considering Instagram, a profile visit would mean how many users landed on your Instagram profile page. 

Profile visits offer a holistic view of interest in your brand on social media. A spike in profile visits might be due to a recent post going viral or a mention from an influencer. This KPI indicates general brand curiosity and can be a precursor to gaining new followers.

Not convinced that your business is using the ideal social media platforms? We have a free guide that can help: Find the Perfect Social Media Mix for Your Marketing Strategy

4. Audience Growth Rate  

KPIs for awareness campaigns provide insights into how potent your campaign is at increasing your brand’s visibility and recall among your target demographic. Your audience should be expanding, not contracting. 

Setting an audience growth rate KPI can help your team track the development of your online presence and illustrate how follower counts evolve and change over time. You can calculate your growth rate using basic math. Keep a weekly or monthly tally so it’s easy to identify trends. 

5. Traffic  

Whether driven by organic efforts or by KPIs for paid social media, an indispensable metric to monitor is your website’s traffic. You need to know what percentage originates on social media. If you’re investing significant time and money into your social media marketing strategy, you want to ensure it is effective in funneling consumers to your landing page. 

In contrast to profile visits, this metric goes beyond the platform. If on Instagram, this could refer to users who clicked a link in your bio or a swipe-up link in your story, directing them to your website.

One way to determine traffic is by monitoring your landing page performance. If you’re leading users to a particular webpage from your paid social media ads, observe the results of that page. This means checking not only how many visitors land on the page but also what they do once they’re there. Do they sign up, make a purchase, or simply leave?  

6. Amplification Rate 

This metric measures the rate of followers who are sharing your content with their own audience. Your company’s social media amplification rate shows the volume of consumers willing to be openly associated with your brand. This is a critical component of a healthy social media strategy. 

You can measure your amplification rate through the number of reposts, retweets, re-pins, or any other type of share. 

7. Bounce Rate 

Unfortunately, not everyone who clicks on a link or CTA button sticks around to absorb the messaging. In fact, some brands have a fantastic CTR, and their traffic metrics are high, but their bounce rate is through the roof. 

Ultimately, this means your marketing messaging or content is effective, but consumers aren’t finding value in your website. This instant drop-off is an excellent indicator of audience relevance and the effectiveness of your website content or layout.  

8.  Cost Per Click (CPC) 

Your CPC rate represents how much money your brand spends on clicks for sponsored posts. Tracking this amount will help your team ensure you get the most out of paid media. You’ll always be hunting for the lowest CPC. There’s a correlation between audience targeting, content, and CPC, making it a valuable metric to keep an eye on. 

9. Conversion Rate 

How many of your company’s social media posts result in purchases, sign-ups, website visits, or other desirable consumer actions? A conversion rate KPI will tell you exactly that.  

You can calculate your audience’s conversion rate by comparing the number of total clicks on a post with the number of desired actions that occur directly from it. A high conversion rate is hugely important because it signifies that your audience is responding to your strategy.  

10. Followers (Active Vs. Passive) 

A high follower count doesn’t necessarily mean a high engagement rate. Why? Because not all followers are active online. Many sign up, browse, follow some accounts, and never visit the profile again. Others may follow you but have their feeds taken up by other brands, rendering them passive.  

Tracking the number of both active and passive followers can help your brand know where to focus its attention when it comes to engagement. 

11. Consumer Satisfaction Score (CSat) 

Many social media platforms provide the option for hosting polls. These allow consumers to give feedback on their experiences with your brand, which is something you can leverage.  

Your brand’s CSat can be measured by asking your followers how happy they are about your products or services. The number of positive responses will provide valuable insight into how your audience really perceives you and what you can improve on to make them more satisfied. 

12. Impressions 

Social media impressions represent the number of times a post is visible in someone’s timeline or feed. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the person has read or acknowledged it but that it made an appearance on their screen.  

Impressions are an important KPI for brand awareness as they signify how often your content is being displayed. This metric is necessary for comprehending social media reach, giving you the number of eyeballs who might have encountered your content. 

13. Share of Voice

“Share of Voice” (SOV) is a brand awareness KPI that shows how often your brand is mentioned compared to competitors. This metric helps gauge your brand’s digital impact and guide your strategy. If your SOV is less than key competitors, delve into their content to discern what they’re doing differently. Are they addressing topics you aren’t, or is their content more engaging? Alternatively, a sudden increase in SOV can indicate that specific content resonated. Analyze the traits of this content and consider producing more in the same vein. 

Best Practices: How to Get the Most Out of Your KPIs  

Now that you know which social media KPIs you should be tracking, let’s get stuck into some best practices for bringing them to life.  

  • Define your big-picture objectives – Think beyond just data. What is the greater purpose behind your KPIs? How do the metrics you and your team settle into your organization’s long-term strategy? Defining your objectives helps you and your team understand the bigger picture.  
  • Measure current performance – You can’t measure growth unless you truly understand your starting point. Establishing your social media strategy’s current performance rates will serve as helpful benchmark data for reaching your social media goals.   
  • Differentiate between platforms – Each social media platform should have its own approach to KPI setting because they  all use different metrics for engagement. Remember to draw up your KPIs based on which platforms your company uses.  
  • Be realistic – Don’t set social media KPIs that aren’t realistically achievable for your company or industry. Consider the scale, budget, and social media goals first so that you can work towards hitting KPIs consistently and confidently.  
  • Regularly review – There’s no point in setting KPIs if you aren’t doing regular digital marketing reports of their progression. Schedule monthly, quarterly, and annual review sessions to reflect on your growth. Assess if you’ve reached your social media goals, and examine alternative strategies if needed.  

How To Set Social Media KPIs – Native vs. External Solutions  

When setting social media KPIs, you have two main options: native and external solutions.  

Native solutions are the built-in social media tracking and measurement systems platforms provide.  

Instagram Business, Meta Business Suite, and Twitter for Business fall into the native solutions category. They equip brands with basic but current tools for tracking site-relevant KPIs and provide insights into consumer data. 

However, native tools are limited in their capacity for growth. They don’t allow for an integrative perspective on multiple channels. It can be bitty and time-intensive from a reporting perspective.  

External solutions, on the other hand, take a much more expansive and integrative route to KPI tracking. Any organization that offers social media marketing, strategy, or advocacy services falls into this category.  

Equipped with the tools, resources, and applied professional experience, external solutions such as Clearview Social can enable your team to set, measure, and hit vital  KPIs.  

Try Clearview Social 

With Clearview Social, you can track essential social media KPIs for your employee advocacy program. You’ll gain quick access to fundamental social media analytics like clickthrough rates andemployee shares, as well as which businesses viewed your content, and various other valuable content statistics. Moreover, you’ll be able to ascertain your earned media value.  

These insights give you the tools to take your social media marketing strategy to the next level. As a marketer, your goal is always going to be improving ROI—use Clearview Social to quantify this into something tangible. 

Interested in finding a scalable solution for your business? Request a demo today.

 

This post has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.