When you think about social media strategy, we doubt the first thing on your mind is social media KPIs. Are we right or are we super right?
Content creation, scheduling and calendars, engagement, and analytics – these are some of the main things that may come up. We want to create the best stuff and get it out there consistently.
Of course, these elements are necessary but what value do they bring to your business? How do you see the impact social media activity has on your business, if any? What can you do to make sure you’re not just posting for the sake of, but that your efforts add value?
The answer: social media KPIs.
This blog post will explain what they are, why they matter, and which ones you should start tracking.
What Are Social Media KPIs?
The term ‘KPI’ means Key Performance Indicator. KPIs are metrics or factors that businesses use to see the performance in a specific area over time. It may sound complex, but it’s really quite simple.
All businesses set goals. For example, your business may aim to increase its reach on social media. To see how well or poorly this goal is being met, the business can use KPIs to track reach over time and monitor its growth or decline.
This includes indicators like the number of followers or an audience growth rate, which can both influence your reach.
So, basically, KPIs track the progress of your social media strategy and how you’re doing at reaching your goals.
Why Should You Track KPIs On Social Media?
Social media KPIs help you monitor the success of your social media strategy. By tracking them, you can see what efforts work in the favor of your strategy and which ones you can afford to cut.
This allows you to constantly improve your social media plan, removing any tasks that don’t help you achieve your goal.
With KPIs, you can also clearly highlight the impact of the strategy on your business. The KPIs become a practical representation that your social media team can use to show execs and managers the impact of their efforts.
Social media is a “direct engagement” between your brand and your audience. This makes KPIs and metrics a good way to see the state of this relationship. You can gauge your brand health and customer support by seeing what the metrics say.
3 Social Media KPIs You Absolutely Must Keep Tabs On
These are the main KPIs that you MUST keep an eye on for a banging social media strategy:
1. Engagement
This is a popular one that most people at least know a little bit about. Engagement is about all the ways that your audience (followers and non-followers) interact with your social media page and posts.
So, the engagement rate on a platform can reflect the impact of your posts and strategy. Is your audience interacting with you? And how often?
The engagement rate is also more like an umbrella or combo of all the ways other users can engage with your page. When broken up, it includes:
- Mentions or tags
- Comments
- Retweets or reshares
- Post engagement
- Likes
With this KPI, it’s important to not just look at one metric. For example, your post may not get many retweets or shares but may have a lot of likes. This could be a post that prompts people to share or forward a message so it makes sense that there are more reshares than likes.
2. Redirections
Social media channels serve as only a fraction of your business. Don’t forget this!
How does your social media contribute to the success of your business then? What is the return on investment?
The KPIs you can measure to see how social media brings practical value to your business are referrals and conversions.
Conversions will tell you how many people made a purchase with you after seeing your social media post. In other words, your social media channel “converted” them.
Referrals show you where website visitors come from. For example, your website referral analytics can tell you if a visitor gets redirected from your social media account.
Both these KPIs show you how your social media account works to bring people to your website. And how it can add to your bottom line on a practical level.
It can also show you which campaigns work better than others so you can continuously improve your social media strategy to help drive business growth.
3. Impressions & Reach
It’s easy to get confused between impressions and reach. That’s why we wrote this awesome comparison article to help you get the hang of it.
For your shared posts, impressions show the number of times the post appears on other users’ timelines.
Reach, on the other hand, is the potential users the post could appear to. These don’t have to be followers.
Although they measure different things, reach and impressions both tell an important story about brand awareness. They also speak on the potential footprint or travel of your posts.
But, you have to look at both with other metrics.
If your post, for example, has 100 impressions but only 20 likes, then 80 people saw the post but didn’t like it. Did they scroll too quickly past it? Were they just being stingy with the double-tap? Or was it just not a great post?
Analyzing your impressions and reach against other metrics in this way can help you learn which types of content to post.
Closing Thoughts
Social media is not simply about posting and liking. If you want to get it right, you need to think strategically. And you need to reflect on that strategy, too.
Social media KPIs are a fantastic tool for reflection and they tell you all you need to know to make your socials the best.
Use these three as a starting point to a KPI- and metric-driven social media plan!
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