Everyone savours the thrill of seeing their latest Facebook post rack up likes. But if you’re using social media to market your business, you need to take a more analytical approach than simply watching your status updates. Social media has its own array of KPIs and metrics that you’ll need to acquaint yourself with to really thrive. Some of them can be accessed directly through the platforms themselves, others require you to monitor your website traffic via Google Analytics.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but these 5 key social media KPIs provide simple ways of measuring and improving your performance.
Your impressions are one of the most important social media KPIs for gauging how many people your business is reaching.
As a metric, they represent the number of times that your post has appeared in another person’s news feed.
That’s not to say that all of those people had a good look at it. But it’s a basic indicator of how far your content is travelling.
Most social networks allow you to check your impressions for each post via their in-built analytics or insights dashboard. Keep an eye on each post’s impressions, and measure them over time. If you see that posts published at a particular hour of the day are getting more impressions than others, concentrate your content within those time frames to maximise your chances of someone taking notice.
Remember not to get your impressions mixed up with your number of fans or followers - not every person who follows you will have seen your latest post.
This KPI gives you a deeper picture of how well your audience is developing than simply looking at your follower or fan count.
To find your audience growth rate for a given month, divide your number of new followers for that month by your total follower count, and then multiply that by 100.
For example, if you’d gained 50 Facebook fans in February, bringing you up to 550 fans overall, your growth rate for that month would be 10%. You’d then want to cross-reference that number with previous months to discover how well your growth strategy has fared over time.
If you notice that recent few months have come up short against others, think about the kind of content you were posting in the better performing months, and try and imitate that content in future. If not, great - keep doing what you’re doing!
Read this article to discover more about widening your social media circle.
Posts that get people to take an action, whether it’s retweeting or commenting, will automatically make their way further up people’s feeds, boosting your impressions and maximising your audience.
Each social platform has its own particular ways of engaging with a post, so we’ll focus on 3 of Facebook’s core engagements: likes, clicks and shares, all of which can be measured straight from your page’s ‘Insights’ tab.
If content with a particular theme, structure or time of posting is consistently getting more likes from your followers than other posts, you’ll know that you’ve hit upon a winning formula to guide your posts going forward.
Similarly, you’ll probably want to be linking to your business’s website and landing pages fairly frequently. Therefore, you’ll want to measure the number of clicks you’re receiving for each post containing a link.
One of the more easily overlooked social media KPIs is your number of shares. When people are sharing your content, they’re voluntarily demonstrating to their friends that your content means something to them. Simply put, they’re spreading your name without you lifting a finger.
Keep an eye on your share figures, as the posts that generate the most shares are the ones that you really should keep emulating.
These social media KPIs are ultimately the most important of them all. They let you know how successful your social profiles are at propelling people onto your website and getting them to perform the actions most vital to the health of your business.
First, you’ll have to decide which actions on your website can be classed as a goal for your business. To monitor them, you’ll have to have Google Analytics software installed on your website.
If you sell products online, then your primary measurable goal would be people reaching your order complete page after a purchase. If you don’t, maybe you’d measure people arriving at your ‘contact us’ page, pressing a button to request a call back, or even downloading some of your content. You can find out more about how to assign these goals on Google Analytics here.
To really get a handle on how well your social strategy is performing, you need to monitor what proportion of people completing these goals have arrived on your site from social media. To do this, navigate to the ‘Goals’ tab of your Analytics dashboard, and click the button that says ‘Source/Medium’. This will give you a rundown of where successful goal-completers have reached your site from.
If your social media isn’t generating those conversions, you need to rethink how you’re currently trying to guide followers onto your site to do what you want them to do. Click here to discover how to improve your social media conversion rates.
Platforms like Facebook and Twitter can seem difficult to plan for from a marketing perspective, but if you keep your attention firmly planted on these social media KPIs, you’ll quickly have a much clearer idea of how your business can harness the power of social media to grow.
Want to know how to measure your wider digital strategy? Download our free guide to the 5 key metrics in online marketing you need to know.
