Social Media Marketing KPIs to Keep an Eye On

According to a recent survey, about two-thirds of American small businesses rely on social media as part of their digital marketing strategy. Roughly 25% of the owners of these small businesses went as far as to say that social media is their most effective digital marketing tool.

If your company isn’t currently using social media marketing to your advantage, you should start doing it now. It’s an incredible way to connect both with your current customers and your potential customers online.

You should also know which social media marketing KPIs you should keep a close eye on while utilizing platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even TikTok for marketing purposes. These key performance indicators will give you a good idea as to how your various social media marketing campaigns are doing.

Take a look at several of the most important social media marketing KPIs below.

Reach

When your business starts putting up social media posts, you want as many people as possible to see them. The more people that see your social media posts, the greater your reach will be.

Reach is one of the first social media marketing KPIs that you’ll want to watch. There are a handful of different ways in which you can track it. We’re going to break down several of them for you now.

Followers

It’s going to be extremely easy for you to follow along with how many followers your company’s various social media pages have. You should be able to see your follower count somewhere near the top of each page.

When you’re first launching social media accounts for your company, you should see your follower count go up once you begin spreading the word about your business. You’ll also need to focus on creating quality social media content to continue to attract new followers.

Impressions

In addition to monitoring your followers on social media, you’ll also need to sneak a peek at how many impressions you’re getting. Impressions will indicate the number of times that your social media profile or a post on a social media platform has been viewed.

It’s worth noting that impressions are different from post reach, which is another thing that you’ll need to monitor on social media. Impressions will include all of the views a post or your profile gets even if the same account views or visits multiple times.

Post Reach

Post reach is usually listed right next to impressions when it comes to social media marketing KPIs, but as we just mentioned, it’s a different category entirely. When it comes to post reach, only unique accounts that have seen one of your social media posts or visited your profile will be counted.

If the same account visits your profile five times, it’ll count as five impressions. But it’ll only count as one visit in terms of post reach. As a result, post reach will give you a better idea of how many unique visitors are seeing your posts or visiting your social media profiles.

Web Traffic

You’re probably not going to include links to your company’s website in every single social media post you put up. That’s not always the best way to go about utilizing social media marketing.

However, you will want to put up links to posts every so often, and the web traffic metric will let you know how much traffic your social media posts are generating. It’ll help you figure out how much people liked a blog post you shared on social media or how successful a sale that you held through social media was.

Engagement

You obviously want people to see the posts that you put up on social media on behalf of your company, but you want them to do more than just view them. You also want them to engage with these posts.

Engagement is the second of the major social media marketing KPIs, and it’s arguably the most important one of all. The more that people engage with your social media content, the more worthwhile social media marketing as a whole will be. Here are some of the ways you can tell whether people are engaging with your social media posts.

Clicks

In the past, clicks on social media posts typically referred to people clicking on a link that led to a company’s website. These days, people can click on posts to do more than just this.

They can, for example, click on a social media post to expand it so that they can read the full caption for it. They can also click on it to make a photo larger so that they can see it.

Whatever the case, clicks are a great measure of engagement on your social media posts. If you’re getting enough clicks, it often means you’re putting up content that is interesting to people.

Likes

If people like what they see when you put up a social media post, they’ll do more than click on it. They’ll also hit some form of a “Like” button to show that they approve of it or support it in some way.

Some social media platforms have stopped openly displaying how many likes that posts get, but you should still be able to see the likes for yourself. It’ll help you determine which kinds of social media posts people seem to like to see from your company the most.

Comments

After checking out a social media post from your company, people might have something to say about it. They’ll leave comments that will be attached to the post.

Comments can actually help to drive up engagement on social media posts. They’ll sometimes result in other people responding to these comments and making them more interactive.

Your company should think about jumping into your comments sections as often as you can to interact with people. It’ll increase the chances of them following you and continuing to engage with your content.

Shares

You could make the argument that the shares your social media posts get will be the most important social media marketing KPIs of all. Shares will take place when people take a social media post you put up and send it to others.

Shares are great because they’ll help get your company’s social media posts in front of people who might not otherwise see them. It’s why you should closely monitor how many shares posts are getting and try to figure out what is making some of your posts so shareable.

Mentions

It’s relatively easy to track things like clicks, likes, comments, and shares on social media posts. You’ll have to work a little harder to keep tabs on mentions.

However, most social media platforms will have a mentions section that will show you what people are saying about you in social media posts that they put up. As long as they tag you in these posts, you’ll be able to see what they’ve said.

In some cases, people will mention your company in a positive way and thank you for a great experience. In others they might have complaints about your company that they want to share with others. Either way, you should stay on top of your mentions and respond to them accordingly.

Conversions

If the only thing your company is ever able to do on social media is to expand your reach and engage with people who come across your content, you’ll be in decent enough shape. Ideally, you want your social media presence to result in additional sales for your company across the board.

With this in mind, you’ll want to track the third major social media marketing KPI, which is conversions. It’ll help you see how your social media efforts are helping your bottom line. Here are several ways you can track this aspect of things.

Sales Revenue

You should try not to make all the social media posts that your company puts up about the products and services you sell. It’ll make your social media profiles look and feel more promotional than you might like.

You should feel free to promote products and services from time to time however, and you should also keep track of how many people click through to your website after seeing promotional posts and buy them. This will show you that all your social media efforts are well worth it.

Lead Conversion Rate

People might not necessarily purchase products and/or services from your company immediately after seeing them on your social media pages, but if you’re able to build up enough of a connection with them over time, they might eventually get around to buying something from you.

In this case, you’ll be able to track your lead conversion rate. It can be slightly more complicated keeping an eye on this, but there is software that you can use to get the job done.

Non-Revenue Conversions

Even if people don’t buy anything from you at this time, you should still monitor other ways in which they might support your business. For instance, they may sign up for your email newsletter through social media or head to your website to download more information about something you sell.

This is another metric that can be a little tricky to track, but it’s worth taking notes on how people might be interacting with your website through social media, even if they aren’t investing in anything from you in a monetary sense.

Customer Loyalty

One of the reasons why social media marketing has become so effective for small businesses is that it’s allowed them to create customer loyalty. You’ll want to try to measure customer loyalty as best you can since it can lead to future purchases and recommendations.

Many people will be more likely to buy a product or service from a company after having a good interaction with this company on social media. Keep this in the back of your mind when running your company’s social media accounts. Here are a handful of ways that you can track customer loyalty.

Cost Per Lead

At some point, you may want to start running advertisements on social media to expand your reach. If you do this, you’ll want to calculate what the cost per lead is so that you know you’re getting your money’s worth.

You might need to tinker with your social media advertising strategy if you aren’t getting a good return on investment when you advertise on social media sites.

Issues Resolved

You won’t be able to monitor this metric through a social media platform, but you should keep track of how many issues your company is able to resolve online.

People used to have to call or email companies to file complaints, ask for refunds, etc., but these days, many are doing this right online through social media.

Your company should strive to respond to people file complaints and work to resolve their issues as best you can. You should also keep a running list of all the issues you’re able to resolve to see the power of social media in full effect.

Customer Lifetime Value

Once you convince someone to buy something from your company, you want them to come back again. Your repeat customers are going to serve as the foundation of your company in many ways.

This metric will help you calculate how much a customer has spent with your company over time. If this number is on the lower side, you’ll need to beef up your approach to customer loyalty to get people to start coming back to your business repeatedly more often.

Remember the Importance of These Social Media Marketing KPIs

Social media used to be an afterthought for far too many companies when it came to marketing. Very few of them took it as seriously as they should have as recently as a decade ago.

Today, it’s very important for your company to maintain a strong social media marketing strategy. You also need to keep an eye on these social media marketing KPIs so that you know what adjustments you have to make to increase the success of your social media marketing campaigns.

Would you like to have a digital marketing review done so that you’re able to find out the marketing tips you should be using from now on? Contact us to secure them.