Social media KPIs you should pay attention to for business growth and success
We know the power of social media for brand growth and success. What we also know is that to succeed, we must have a roadmap or strategy that is underpinned by our objectives. After all, you cannot get to a destination without a map or some sort of navigation.
KPIs or key performance indicators are the numbers you look at to see if your strategy is working and helping you to meet your goals. Metrics and KPIs do not tell the entire story by themselves. In other words, it is the combination of numerous KPIs that will enable you to see if you are making progress towards your goals.
Below you’ll find a free tool to help you apply the learnings in this blog
Setting social media KPIs
Before we dive into the social media KPIs you should pay attention to for business growth and success, let’s discuss how to set social media KPIs. Setting the right KPIs will ensure you are tracking the most vital analytics and metrics. Your KPIs must be directly connected to your business objectives.
However, in addition to that, they must pertain to where you are in your strategy implementation, business growth, and so much more. We recommend you get started by setting your social media goals. Think about what you would like to achieve through your strategy implementation. Once you have determined your social goals, take a look at your organisation’s growth stage.
In other words, if you are a startup that is new to the block, chances are sales are very important. However, engagement and reach and focusing on building a community will be the best-case scenario for long-term business and social media growth. Those more established businesses, though may be focusing more on the costs and conversions related to social media.
After this point, you want to pinpoint several KPIs to monitor and track. It’s important not to overload yourself and focus on too many as this can take you away from progress in achieving your goals. KPIs can be metrics, however, not all metrics are necessarily KPIs.
Looking at many metrics will help you determine your overall performance, but you need to focus more, so on the ones that directly affect your business’s bottom line. Think about which ones will assist you in comprehending whether your social media efforts are driving your progress towards your business objectives. For instance, if your business goals prioritise social media ales, you should track metrics like web traffic and follower count.
Social media KPIs you should track for business growth and success
Now you understand the idea of social media KPIs better and how to determine which best suit your business goals. Whilst each business is different, we’re sharing the main social media KPIs we feel businesses should pay attention to.
Follower count
This is an important metric to pay attention to as it tells you how many accounts are invested in your brand. You’ll be able to see these numbers on your social media profiles. Each month, you should look at the follower count and see if it has gone up or down. This will let you know whether the content you are putting out is right for your brand or if you need to try something different.
Impressions
Social media impressions are also vital to focus on. It is essential to note, however, that impressions are not the same as reach. Impressions tell you how many times a profile or a post has been seen. It essentially totals the views of a profile or post. It also does not distinguish between unique accounts. What this means is that one account could see the same post in their feed six times, which equates to six impressions.
Reach
In the social media space, reach is too an essential metric to track. Post reach shares the number of unique accounts that saw your post. Take the example of impressions, when one account sees the same post six times, the reach would still be one. Post reach can be found in the same analytics area as post impressions.
Website traffic
Website traffic is the perfect way to see how well your posts with links to your website are performing. It can also be a great measurement of campaign performance. Besides that, website traffic can show how your social media content strategy is helping you to increase sales. If your website traffic is high in a particular month, you can likely determine that your social media efforts had a great part in that.
Engagement
Engagement refers to things like clicks, shares, comments, likes, and mentions. It is important to track engagement as it will give you insights into what content is performing well and what your customers want to see on your social media accounts. Engagement is particularly essential for those brands who wish to build a community as you want to ensure you are engaging back with your audience.
Lead conversion rate
When it comes to social media goals, most businesses will have one common goal - to make and increase sales. This is why paying attention to lead conversion rate is useful. It allows you to determine how well your social media strategy is working. Social media is all about building customer trust and relationships and converting that trust into leads. However, you need to keep on top of how many followers you are successfully turning into leads.
Summary
Tracking social media KPIs is a very crucial part of any social media marketing strategy. If you do not pay attention to various KPIs, you will not know if you are progressing towards your goals. In saying that, trying to follow every KPI and metric would be quite overwhelming. This is why we’ve shared what we view as the most important ones to watch for business growth and success.
Each business has different goals so you may find some of the above KPIs are less relevant for your business than others. However, we hope this can be a quality starting point for you to start tracking your social media performance. If you want to take your social media to the next level, contact us today. Our team works to understand your goals and create a strategy designed to help you achieve them. We create content that is right for your audience and track your success to ensure your accounts are going in the right direction.