4.89 billion people, or more than half of the world's population, use social media every day, from TikTok to Facebook. A lot of these groups are using social media to connect with businesses, but not all of them are. Stats on social media marketing show that social is very important for businesses:
People who use the internet spend 151 minutes a day on social media.
It is expected that $268 billion will be spent on ads on social media sites this year.
Fourteen percent more people say they found a product through a focused ad than through an organic post by a brand.
That being said, you need to keep an eye on the right social media measures and KPIs to know how social media is really affecting your business. That's where we come in. This article will teach you more about what social media KPIs are, how to set them up correctly, and which ones to track for each of your business goals.
What are KPIs and measurements for social media?
Key performance indicator is what KPI stands for. It's a business term that doesn't just mean selling on social media. We'll only talk about social media KPIs in this guide, though.
If you want to know if your plan is working and your goals are being met, you can look at your KPIs. Not all the story can be told by metrics and KPIs alone. It's the sum of several KPIs that will show you if you're on track to hit your goal.
There is a list of KPIs in this article, organized by type. You'll need a business account on each site to get to most of these metrics. You can find the data you need in the analytics area, or you can use a company like Shelley’s Social Media Social to get the social media analytics you need more quickly without having to pull data from each network separately.
How to set KPIs and measures for social media
But first, let's talk about how to set the right KPIs for social media so that you can keep an eye on the most important data and numbers. Your KPIs should be linked to your business goals in a clear way. But they also need to be relevant to where you are in growing your business, putting your plan into action, and other things.
Here are some tips to help you find the right KPIs to track on social media.
Set goals for your social media accounts.
First things first, you need to make plans for your social media. What do you want your plan to help you do? These should be in line with the big business goals that your CEO, sales team, and/or marketing team have set.
For instance, if your business wants to reach more people and make more people aware of its brand, your social media goals will probably be about doing the same. But if you want more leads and sales for your business, your social media goals should be focused on conversions.
This article lists KPIs for social media, and each one is broken down by social media goal to help you find the best ones to track in order to correctly measure performance and help your company's bottom line.
Check out where your business is in its growth.
Dealing with customers is still important if you work for a new company. But the best way for social media and business growth in the long term is to focus on building a community and getting more people to interact with your posts. Also, startups will want to see if the market will accept them, so KPIs and metrics related to customer comments are very important.
But bigger, more established companies may be more interested in conversions and how much it takes to get those customers from social media.
Pick out just a few KPIs to keep an eye on.
Remember that not all metrics are KPIs, but some KPIs are metrics. You could keep an eye on a bunch of different social media metrics to see how well you're doing generally.
Your KPIs, on the other hand, will be closely linked to the bottom line of your business. Just name a few that will really help you figure out if your social media efforts are helping your business reach its goals.
In this case, if your business goals are to make sales on social media, you'll still need to keep an eye on things like the number of followers and web traffic. Of course, your KPIs will have something to do with the total number of sales, the cost per purchase, or the total amount of money made.
1. KPIs for reach on social media
What can you do to make sure that your ads and marketing messages reach the right people? How many people have heard that message? Reach is a broad term for how many people see your posts and media on social media. It also includes how many people your business message might be able to reach.
How many followers
Follower count is an important measure to keep an eye on because it tells you how many accounts are following your brand. Followers or fans are different on each site. You can find these numbers on your personal page. You can also find them in the tool you use to handle your social media accounts.
Impressions
Reach and views on social media are not the same thing. It tells you how many times a page or post has been seen. It doesn't tell the difference between different accounts; it just adds up the views. That is, the same post could show up four times in the feed of one account, which is the same as four views.
Based on the network you're looking at, there are different kinds of views. You can see how many times a Pin has been seen on Pinterest, for example. Instagram counts how many times a post or story is seen.
Post Reach
Post reach, which is a more detailed metric than reach KPIs as a whole, tells you how many different accounts saw your post on social media. Once more, that one account saw the same post four times, which means the post reached one person.
Post reach is often found in the same part of statistics as post impressions. Because of these changes, post reach is likely to be less than post impressions. For example, you'll be able to see that a post that was seen by 10 different accounts got 50 hits.
To get a rough idea of your reach, divide the number of views by the number of people who follow you. This information is also easy to find on some sites and by using a tool for social media analytics.
Web Traffic
Web traffic is a good way to see how well posts that link to your website are doing. It's also a good way to see how well a campaign is doing. It tells you how many times someone clicked through from one of your social media accounts to one of your website pages.
Share of Voice
Share of voice (SOV) tells you how far ahead of your competitors you are in the online world. This is not an easy one to find in native statistics. You'll need to pick which keywords, hashtags, or groups you want to study instead. You would make a list of hashtags and terms to look at, say, if you want to see your SOV around coffee-related topics.
2. Social media KPIs for engagement
It's good to know that people are seeing your posts and accounts with reach numbers, but what else can you tell? They might be watching, but do they also click on posts, comment on them, or share them?
Brands need to be active on social media in order to do well online. If there is no interaction, it's like talking to a group of people while they either stare at you blankly or just walk by.
Clicks
When you read an Instagram comment, did the first line grab your attention so much that you had to click to read more? In the past, clicks were about posts with links that you could click on. The number of clicks has changed along with the posts on social media.
There are clicks everywhere. When you click on a post, it could be an Instagram caption that grows or a Tweet that lets you look through pictures. Not only that, but you can also click on your Instagram personal page and on a Pin to make it bigger.
These numbers can be found in your website's stats or summed up in an online tool like Google Analytics. The more you learn about the social networks you want to use, the more you'll understand which clicks they track and how they name these measures.
Likes
You know how to double-tap a post to show how much you liked an Instagram picture. If someone liked or favored your post, it means they thought it was worth interacting with. You can still see these numbers in your statistics, even though Instagram and Facebook have made it so that the public can't see the number of likes.
Shares
Shares on posts and profiles are a great way to see how engaged people are. It means that people found your post so interesting that they had to share it or send it to someone else.
On different sites, shares are called different things. In Pinterest, it's called a save, in Twitter, a retweet, and on Instagram, you can use the share icon to send a direct message or post a story. On Facebook, it's still called a share, but you have a lot of choices. A lot of shares is another sign of how popular a post is.
Comments
Comments, like likes, are another important way for users to interact with a website. Comments can be made on blogs or livestreams. You can find these in your own stats. You can see them broken down by post or as a whole.
Comments, like shares, are a good sign of a post that people are interested in. You can also use the number of comments to see how much time your social team has to work or where they might need more help. Not only are they useful as metrics, but you should also come up with a plan for how to handle social media comments so that you can connect with and reply to your fans.
Mentions
When someone tags your business account or talks about your company, this is called a mention. It could be in a post, a message, a story, or even just to you. This measure isn't always built in, so you might need to use a social media monitoring tool like Mention to see how and how often people talk about your brand's accounts.
The Harris Poll recently did a poll for Shelley’s Social Media and found that 51% of people learn about brands on social media. People are talking about your business even if you're not keeping track of it. To figure out your mentions measure, look at a brand keyword report to find out how often people talk about your brand online, whether they are officially tagging it or not.
Profile Visits
People who are new to your business will do things like visit your website, sign up for your newsletter, and look at your personal page. This number tells you how many times your page has been seen in a certain amount of time. You can find this number in native analytics. It's a good reminder to keep your profile up to date with the most important link places.
3. Social media KPIs for conversions
This is how you can keep track of both the content you post on social media and how people respond to it. What now? Getting these contacts to turn into customers is the next step in the marketing funnel.
Sales income
You want to know if all of your hard work is paying off when you sell things and promote them on social media. Look at your Google Analytics or website builder to see how much money you made from sales. You'll be able to see how many clicks from social media to your website turned into sales and how much money that made you.
E-commerce is also being added to a lot of networks, so you can shop right on the site through posts or streams. In this case, the numbers can be found in the data for your shop.
Lead Conversion Rate
Based on the lead turn rate, you can see how well your social media plan is working. A customer needs time to trust you, but social media is a great place to find new leads. When they see your goods, they might not buy it right away, but when they do, you'll count them as a customer.
Google Analytics lets you keep track of how many of your social media leads turn into customers. A lot of different attribution models and tracking tools might work better for some businesses and their marketing flow.
Non-Revenue Conversions
This is the last type of social media measure that can be used to track conversions: non-revenue. This is a measure for all the things a customer could do that aren't related to a product or service. For example, you can sign up for an email newsletter, read a white paper, or fill out a signup form. You set this conversion, so you decide what does and does not count as a conversion.
4. Social media KPIs for Customer Loyalty
Customers care a lot about how they connect with a brand on social media, and it shows in how many times they buy something or tell their friends about it.
A new study found that when people have a good experience with a brand, they are more likely to buy that brand (78%), choose that brand over the competition (77%), suggest the brand (76%), spend more with that brand (72%), and build a stronger bond (70%). All of these numbers show that social media helps keep customers coming back.
How much each lead costs
The cost per lead KPI tells you how well your plan for advertising or getting leads is working. For costs per lead, each business and field has its own set of rules. Most of the time, if your cost per lead is high, you can change your approach and make better use of your social marketing budget.
Look at your social media ads to find out how much each lead costs. It shows the cost per click and the cost per sale. To make sure your paid social plan works well and doesn't waste money, you should follow these steps.
Problems fixed
Users are choosing social media more and more as the best way to deal with service problems and questions. You won't be able to find the problems resolved metric in a standard analytics dashboard. If you want to figure this out on your own, you can tag Instagram and Facebook direct messages in their combined inboxes to see how well your team is handling messages.
Customer Lifetime Loyalty
The amount of money a customer spends with you over time is shown by their customer lifetime value. After they make their first buy, you'll want them to come back and make more purchases. A high customer lifetime value means that the customer stays with you for a long time.
Multiply the value of a customer
by the average length of time they stay with a business. You can also use online CLV tools to help you with this.
To make your business bigger, use KPIs for social media.
An important part of any social media marketing plan is keeping track of social media KPIs. You can't tell if your business goals are being met without tracking. Combine different KPIs to make sure they help you reach your goals.
Like, you can keep track of your general post engagement rate once you know how many comments, shares, and likes your posts get. As you use tactics that aim to engage people, this number will go up over time.
That's where customer service and business growth are going. You can read our report to learn more about how businesses and customers use social media and how that affects the company.
Need help with your KPI's? Contact us at www.shelleyssocialmedia.com