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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 or department’s impact. Social media KPIs will help you identify where your focus should be. It forces you to define your goals, giving 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 the 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 close to it. By clearly outlining your KPIs, you’ll be able to communicate quickly with other marketing directors and strategists, succinctly updating them 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 focus on can be a challenge . In this post, we’ll look at some of the most important figures 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 come in.
KPIs provide a transparent performance measurement system that enables your team to gauge its current performance and see what needs to change. Strong KPIs benefit your entire organization by clarifying its present position and outlining clear objectives for the future.
12 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 nine KPIs represent the most crucial 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
Engagement is essential on social media. The number of likes, comments, saves, and shares per post offer valuable insight into how consumers perceive your content.
But another engagement metric that often gets forgotten about 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. Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
Your brand’s CTR 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. Audience Growth Rate
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.
4. Traffic
You need to know what percentage of website traffic 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.
5. 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, which 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.
6. Bounce Rate
Unfortunately, not everyone that clicks on a link or CTA button sticks around to absorb the messaging. In fact, some brands have a fantastic CTR, 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 website content or layout.
7. 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.
8. 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 signals that your audience is responding to your strategy.
9. 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 site, especially if you’re running specific awareness or reach campaigns.
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 that allow consumers to give feedback on their experiences with your brand – and you should be taking advantage of that.
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 serve as valuable insight into how your audience really perceives you and what can be improved 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 it did make an appearance on their screen.
Impressions are an important metric for comprehending social media reach and awareness. They give you the number of eyeballs who may have seen your content.
Best Practices: How To Get The Most Out Of Your KPIs
Now that you have a better idea about 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 set tie 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 both now and in the future.
- 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 each platform that your company uses.
- Be realistic – Don’t set social media KPIs that aren’t realistically achievable for your company or your 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, see 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 it comes to 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 all 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, allowing for KPIs to be tracked.
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 critical 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 analytics like click-through rates, employee shares, employee adoption and various content statistics. Moreover, you’ll be able to ascertain your earned media value.
These insights give you the tools you need 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.