12 Critical Social Media KPIs That You $hould Be Tracking

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Today, most businesses promote their brands on social media platforms. If you’ve started allotting significant amounts of your brand’s marketing budget to social media spends, it is necessary to set some metrics to gauge if you’re generating a return on your investment. There are a number of things you can measure your social media efforts. These are known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and it is critical to track these to understand what you’re doing right or wrong.

The social media landscape has changed dramatically over the last few years. Marketers have started focussing more on quality rather than quantity. This is especially important as an increasing number of businesses use social media platforms to drive revenue. Savvy marketers have understood the importance of measuring data and adapting as needed to meet business goals. By tracking the right social media performance indicators, you will be able to develop a foolproof value proposition.

It is essential to set a baseline before you begin. Examine the social media KPIs you’ve chosen and record their current values. It is important to track these numbers since the rate at which they change is the primary indicator for most of these social media metrics. For instance, it’s fantastic if you get 10,000 likes in a day, but the impact is not the same if you get them over a year. You will then be able to focus your efforts on the rate of change of your chosen KPIs.

Social Media KPIs To Track

The KPIs that you can measure, typically differ among social media platforms. These are some of the important KPIs that you should be tracking.

01) Clicks

When people click on the links you provide in your posts, it is tied to the quality of the title, image or content. While some fans of your brand may click on every single link you share, a majority of people, particularly new followers will only click on posts that engage them.

If your post gets a large number of clicks with hardly any shares or likes, this could indicate that while your post grabbed their attention, it did not deliver the quality needed for the person to engage with it. On the other hand, a high level of engagement with hardly any clicks could mean that you need to work on the first impression your content makes. Try experimenting with different images, fonts, and titles.

02) Profile Visits

This metric is not available on all social media platforms, but it’s worth paying attention to if it’s there. Today, customers use social media profile pages to find out more information about brands that they’re interested in. But not all of your followers will visit your profile. While profile visits cannot measure intent to buy, they do indicate whether there’s interest in your brand.

03) Traffic Data

This is an extremely important KPI to measure. It can tell you what percentage of the traffic on your website is coming from social media. If you’re spending a lot of time and effort on your social media content, you’ll need to make sure that this reflects your traffic numbers. These metrics are available through several services including Buffer, Google Analytics, and HubSpot. So, if a significant portion of your traffic is not coming from social media platforms, you may need to work within the reach of your posts.

04) Retweets

Tweets that are shared by the people who follow you with their own network of followers are known as Retweets. These are valuable as your content will reach more potential customers and create an interest in your brand. This extended network of Twitter Users who come across your tweets through someone else will then become part of your primary network if they are interested enough to follow you. Study your tweets to see which have received the most Retweets and put out more of these.

05) Facebook Engaged Users & Page Impressions

On Facebook, you can monitor how many people are checking out your page and its posts and also how they are reacting to them. You can gauge how many likes, comments, and shares each of your posts are getting. By tracking this metric, you can gain insight into how your page and posts are doing and also get historical data to study trends.

06) Reach

Reach is determined by a calculation that takes your number of followers, impressions, and shares into account. It also includes your net followers increase during a period of time. This metric can give you an indication of the potential size of the audience any message you put out could reach. Reach is different from engagement or impressions. It helps you to gauge the maximum number of people you could potentially influence.

07) Inbound Links

This refers to the number of links you get from quality references back to your website or blog. It is essential to make link building a big part of your SEO strategy. When someone links to your site, they are helping you create credibility within the industry. These inbound links have an impact on your search authority. It is necessary to keep track of the number of inbound links you’re getting so that you can ensure that the quality of content you’re putting out is up to the mark.

08) Number of Social Influencers

A social influencer is someone who has a significant following and can drive awareness about a topic, trend or product among their audience. A good indicator of overall success and popularity is the number of influencers your brand is working with. There’s a good possibility that you’re doing something right if people want to work with you and stand by your brand.

09) Blog Subscribers

You can also use your brand’s blog to track your overall success. Maintaining a blog is a key aspect of your content marketing strategy and is a critical component of your social media efforts. An excellent way to gauge the amount of email traffic your blog is getting is by finding out how many email subscribers you have. It is necessary to divert some of your marketing efforts into getting new email subscribers as this can generate a significant amount of blog traffic.

10) Issues Resolved

Customer service is one of the cornerstones of any business. One of your objectives should be to use social media to improve customer service. A great way to measure success is by looking at the number of customer issues that your organization has resolved. More people are going online for issue resolution and turning to social media channels. Customers expect any issues raised on platforms like Twitter to be resolved as soon as possible. So, it is important to track which channels people use to reach you for troubleshooting to make sure these are well-staffed and monitored.

11) Sentiment

How your followers feel about your brand, company or product is referred to as sentiment. Using data collected from social media, companies can attempt to understand customer sentiment.  The sentiments behind a social media message can be understood through the use of natural language processing or other computational methods. Audience sentiment is classified in a number of ways by different analytics platforms. For instance, some do this by categorizing messages based on emotion or tone such as fear, gratitude, contentment, etc. Other use polar classification and simply sort them into positive and negative messages.

12) Video Views

Video marketing has grown tremendously in popularity over the last couple of years. The number of views each of your videos get is easy to measure KPI that can be viewed and monitored by anyone. The inherent qualities of many video platforms make it simple to understand how your audience is reacting to your content.  While judging the effectiveness of a video message goes beyond merely checking the number of views you have, it can be an important parameter to help you gauge the success of your marketing efforts.

KPIs & Tracking Your Success

Today, marketers use numerous social media channels to increase the reach and efficacy of their marketing messages. Since the results and data are found in a number of locations, it can be difficult to track the success of their campaigns. But it is necessary to monitor your social media metrics month after month to really understand your social media performance.

It is important to keep in mind that while these are all great metrics to understand your performance on social media platforms, you should focus on the KPIs that are most relevant. Track the performance indicators that are most pertinent to the platforms that your brand is active on. These will be most relevant to the behavior of your audience. Remember that every brand’s audience is different. Your followers may not be hitting “like” as often as you want, but they could still be making purchases. Track the KPIs that actually make sense for your brand and you’ll soon find success.