Why Social Media Metrics Matter for Tracking KPIs

Let’s begin with the basics: What is KPI? KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator, and it’s a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving its key business objectives. So basically, it evaluates performance and success.

KPIs are excellent social media tracking tools because they allow you to measure the success of your social media marketing efforts. However, before measuring any KPIs, you want to make sure you have a very clear idea of what that success looks like as it relates to your specific business. What are your goals? What’s important to YOU to help you reach those goals?

In the social media world, we’re all familiar with the words “reach” and “impressions,” but do we all actually know what these words mean or understand how they help us achieve our business goals? This blog will help you understand the various key metrics to measure social media success and its impact on your KPIs.

Key Metrics to Measure Social Media Success

Reach

Reach is among the most important social media metrics to track. So what IS reach? It’s the total number of unique accounts that have been exposed to a specific social media post. It also helps measure the number of unique social users that were exposed to a page/profile, a campaign, a particular type of post, or any other sort of segment. 

How this is tracked varies platform by platform, and sometimes these metrics won’t be displayed at all. For example, Facebook displays a reach metric at the bottom of a post on your specific page’s homepage, which is only visible to those logged into an account associated with the page. You can click the “people reached” number, and it will open up insights with more detailed metrics to that post. Twitter, on the other hand, does not provide a reach metric for organic tweets.

So how do you improve your reach? Increase your budget, broaden the targeting, leverage your audience by asking them to interact with your posts, develop unique creative that your followers will want to share, incentivize a subscription to your page or channel, form conversations, and create content that encourages — and deserves — engagement.

Impressions

Impressions are another great social media metric to track because they occur any time a post shows up on a user’s newsfeed. However, how they are tracked depends, again, on the platform.

For instance, Facebook only provides impressions for paid promoted posts, not organic. Whereas, on Twitter, you can click your avatar, select “analytics” from the dropdown menu, and view your page’s total impressions over the last month, and also have the option of viewing impressions for individual posts. 

Although KPI is an excellent social media tracking tool, it’s no Houdini because, in reality, impressions are one of the most challenging social media metrics to track as we have very little control over the things that impact it. However, adjusting your reach to match your end goal will ultimately increase impressions, too.

Engagement

Clicks, comments, favorites, reactions — these are all forms of social media engagement and among the most straightforward social media metrics to track to gauge user approval or interest in your content and the best part? All of the most popular social networking platforms provide you with access to this information. Score!

So what makes engagement so great for measuring social KPIs? It tells you exactly what’s working and what isn’t, who is engaging, how they’re engaging, and what they’re engaging with. Consistent likes are a sign that the content is resonating with your audience. Sharing takes it one step further, telling you that not only did a user enjoy your content, but they enjoyed it so much they thought their feed should see it too, which is the social media equivalent of a recommendation of your brand. Comments create conversations about your brand, and so on. 

In addition to understanding which social media metrics matter, it’s important to track your ROI. What’s that, you ask? Return On Investment is a financial metric or ratio that compares the gain or loss from an investment relative to its cost. ROI also depends on your brand’s goals. Is your goal to drive traffic to your blog or website? Increase newsletter sign-ups? Make sales? In any case, using Google Analytics to track social media ROI will be the best move, or try out Google UTM Builder.

By keeping these social media metrics to track in mind, you can keep a pulse on your KPIs and develop and adjust your content to ensure it resonates with your audience and leads to a greater ROI. KPIs will reveal what your brand is doing well and shed light on where it may be falling short. From here, you can determine next steps for improving and boosting your brand awareness in the long run. 

Still not sure where to start? Get in touch with us and we will help you! From social media metrics to track to content strategy, and everything in between, Serendipit has you covered!