Social media is a vital part of a business’s marketing strategy.
Due to the wide range of available platforms, a business can broadcast its services in several ways, from posting photos and videos to engaging with its audience through comments and private messages.
But to measure the success of its social media strategy, a business has to rely on data produced by key performance indicators or social media KPIs.
By doing so, it can better understand what areas require improvement to stay ahead of the competition.
With that said, this comprehensive guide will introduce you to the different social media KPIs that matter to your brand and the various analytics platforms you can rely on to do the math for you.
- What Are Social Media KPIs?
- How to Set Social Media KPIs
- Crucial Social Media KPIs
- Social Media KPIs for Conversions
- Top-Rated Social Media Analytics
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Are KPIs the Same Thing as Analytics?
- What Are the 4 KPIs for Social Media?
- How Do You Calculate the Value of a Social Media Follower?
- Is There an Ideal Number of Social Media Followers My Business Should Have?
- What Is Engagement Rate and How Do You Calculate It?
- Which Type of Content Gets the Most Engagement?
- How Often Should You Post on Social Media?
- Which Social Media Platforms Should My Business Focus On?
- What’s the Best Time to Have a Social Media Post?
- How to Get More Leads?
- Conclusion
What Are Social Media KPIs?
In simple terms, KPIs are metrics for social media performance to understand whether your business is meeting your marketing goals and whether a change has to be made to your strategy.
Social media KPIs vary from one social media platform to another.
However, most platforms will require you to have a business account to access the analytics page from which you can review your data.
Social media managers mostly handle them.
They can monitor different KPIs of their social media campaign, and their social media efforts are crucial to the business’s growth.
For them, tracking social media KPIs is always an active process.
The KPIs or social media metrics include, but aren’t limited to:
- Engagement rate. Including likes, comments, and shares.
- Reach. The number of unique users that see a post.
- Impressions. The number of times a post is displayed. A unique person could see a post several times; each counts as an impression.
- Clicks. The number of times your content is interacted with, whether it’s a post or an ad.
- Conversion rate. The number of social media leads turned into customers.
How to Set Social Media KPIs
Setting social media KPIs will vary from one social team to another.
However, to streamline it, you should follow the SMART framework, which outlines the crucial components for setting a successful plan for achieving goals.
Your KPIs should be:
- Specific. Define your goal and what it involves. For example, what exactly do you hope to achieve marketing and growth-wise?
- Measurable. Make sure that you can tabulate the data you’re gathering. For example, how many social media users are clicking?
- Achievable. You must know the risks ahead to ensure you can meet your objectives. For example, will there be people interested in the content you post?
- Realistic. While it’s good to think big, it’s also important to think twice about its feasibility. For example, do you have a sufficient budget for your social media marketing strategy?
- Time-Sensitive. To get your desired social media performance for your business, ensure you’re posting time-relevant content.
Crucial Social Media KPIs
While there are many social media KPIs that can help you, the following are some of the most important ones.
Organic Post Search
To get a sense of your organic reach, look at the number of people who have seen your posts.
This can be measured in several ways:
- The total number of impressions (views) that each post has received
- The percentage of followers who have seen any given post
- The percentage of fans who saw the latest content from this brand or business on their feed
Brand Engagement Rate
The brand engagement rate is the percentage of people who responded to your content.
This metric tells you how often someone interacts with your brand on social media, including liking or sharing posts, commenting, and sending direct messages.
It can also be used as an indicator of how well you’re engaging with your audience.
If people regularly respond to what you post on social media, they’re probably interested in what else you have to say!
If this number looks low compared to others in your industry, your approach may need to be corrected. Perhaps there’s too much focus on posting content without considering whether anyone will engage with it.
Comments or Replies
You can use this to improve your content, strategy, and overall social media presence.
Remember the following:
- If you have a lot of comments and replies on posts in general, it means that people are interested in what you’re posting. That could mean they’ll be more likely to click through from one post to another, increasing engagement overall.
- If there are fewer comments/replies per post (or none), then it’s time to adjust. Are these topics not resonating with readers? Or do they need more context? Do you need more images or videos?
The number of shares and likes per post is a good indicator of your content’s popularity.
The more shares and likes you get, the more people engage with your content.
And when people engage with your content, they’re much more likely to buy from you in the future.
Unlike Per Post
Unlike is one of the most important KPIs to track for your social media campaigns.
It’s true!
Unliking a post is a good thing.
It signals that people engage with your content, read it, and think about it.
If people dislike your posts, you’ll know how to approach your social media marketing better.
Remember, feedback is feedback, so always appreciate it whenever someone unlikes your post for a valid reason.
It’s an engagement factor, and you’ll learn from it.
Social Media KPIs for Conversions
There are many social media KPIs that you can track for conversion, but they can be primarily contracted into two major factors.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is a social media KPI that measures the number of leads your business generates.
It also help you connect with potential clients and customers.
It can be measured in various ways, but it’s usually measured as the total number of people who visit your website.
Sales Revenue
Sales revenue is the total amount of money you’ve made from your social channels.
It’s calculated by multiplying the number of people who’ve purchased something from you somehow with the average amount they spent on that purchase.
Top-Rated Social Media Analytics
Here are some top-rated social media analytics that can do the math for you in tracking your KPIs.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is Google’s tool for measuring how users interact with your website.
It tracks where people are coming from, what they’re looking at, how long they stay on your site, and what they’re clicking on.
You can use this information to understand how users interact with your site and what changes you might want to make to get them to do something else with their time.
RivalIQ
RivalIQ measures your brand’s engagement, retention, and loyalty.
It also helps you track your competitors’ performance via a social media report.
It’s an all-in-one platform that lets you see who’s talking about you and what they’re saying so you can keep up with the conversation and respond to customers in real-time.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch helps you monitor and understand your brand across the web.
Whether you want to see what people say about your brand on Yelp or Amazon or know how your new product announcement is playing out on Reddit and Twitter, Brandwatch has you covered.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker can track changes in the behavior pattern of your consumer, helping you see your audience-growth rate.
It’s easy to use and gives you detailed reports on the sentiment and reach of your posts and what other people are saying about you.
If you’re looking for a way to get the most out of your social media strategy, Talkwalker is worth checking out.
Keyhole
Keyhole helps businesses track, analyze, and optimize their social channels.
It’s especially great for businesses trying to increase brand awareness, generate leads, and increase sales.
You can easily see what content your audience engages with the most on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more.
Prowly
Prowly is a Semrush company that can track mentions, build reports, and other things for tracking social media performance.
It’s an exceptional social media reporting tool for your business.
You can find relevant media contacts, and it’s suitable for any PR work you need to be done in the easiest way possible.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are KPIs the Same Thing as Analytics?
KPIs and analytics are two different things.
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators.
It’s a measurement that shows how a company actually performs compared to its goals or objectives.
Meanwhile, analytics is a platform that measures a business process or its results.
For example, if you want to measure your sales team’s performance over time, you might use metrics like average sales per month or an average number of meetings per week.
However, people interchange social media KPI with another thing: social media metric.
In this case, this might make more sense since they don’t differ much in their definition and function
What Are the 4 KPIs for Social Media?
The 4 social media KPIs are the following:
Reach. How many people viewed your post?
Engagement. How many people interacted with your post?
Shares. How many people shared your post?
Conversions. How many people who viewed, engaged with, and shared your post converted into customers?
How Do You Calculate the Value of a Social Media Follower?
The value of a social media follower can be calculated via valueoflike.com.
Is There an Ideal Number of Social Media Followers My Business Should Have?
There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to social media, and that’s why it’s so important to know your audience to know your ideal follower count.
So what does knowing your audience mean?
It means knowing who they are and what they want.
If you’re a new brand trying to establish yourself in the market, it might be smart to focus on building a strong following on Instagram and Facebook first.
What Is Engagement Rate and How Do You Calculate It?
The engagement rate measures how many people engage with your posts on social media.
It’s calculated by dividing the number of likes, shares, comments, and clicks on your post by the total number of followers, then multiplied by 100.
You can use this formula to track your posts’ engagement.
So, if you have 100 impressions and 350 followers, your rate would be 28.57%.
Which Type of Content Gets the Most Engagement?
The ones with pictures, illustrations, and videos get the most engagement—basically, visual content. You can see the proof in the different social media KPIs you’ll be monitoring.
You see, people are highly visual creatures.
It’s easier for us to learn and absorb content by seeing pictures or illustrations about them.
What’s more, we easily retain this information for days and months to come.
So if you have leads who decide to visit your website at a later time, they’ll easily remember it because of your catchy illustrations and whatnot.
Most businesses nowadays incorporate catchy illustrations, graphs, pictures, etc. in their write-ups to stir the interest of their target audience.
Still, it’s important to create a good mix of texts and images for your social media content to get better leads that will soon be converted into customers.
How Often Should You Post on Social Media?
It depends on your audience.
Always refer to each KPI as much as possible to know how often you should post on social platforms.
If your audience is content-hungry and likes to be teased with a little bit of information before they’re given the whole scoop, posting thrice a week is probably fine.
However, if they want to know what’s happening right away and are less interested in being teased, post daily!
It also depends on how much content you have to share on a social media page.
If you have a ton of stuff to say, then it’s best to post more often to ensure social media success.
Of course, it should be paired with the right monitoring of engagement metrics.
Most importantly, you post when it feels natural for you.
Don’t make it too obvious that you’re doing it for the benefit of your company because people will see it negatively.
Which Social Media Platforms Should My Business Focus On?
It always depends on your target audience.
However, it’s also important to look at it geographically.
What does that mean?
Well, each country has its most famous social media platform with millions of social media accounts, and it’s always crucial to take advantage of that.
According to oberlo.com, Facebook had the most users in the US in 2022, with about 74.2%, while Reddit had the least users, with only 27.9% of users.
This might be the other way around in other countries, so it’s important to know the number of users per place to decide better what social media platform you’ll focus on for your business.
However, you can always post on various social media platforms at the same time. Reposting your content wouldn’t take that much effort anyway.
What’s the Best Time to Have a Social Media Post?
It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.
Your social media post should be aligned with your business’s goals.
Suppose you’re trying to get more followers.
Posting daily on different social media channels will help you build a consistent following and make people more likely to follow and engage with your content.
You may also make social media posts according to trends and try to relate that to your business’s services or products.
Experimenting is the best way to determine what’s best for your business.
Try different strategies at different times of day, take note of which ones work best, then stick with those that give you the results you want.
How to Get More Leads?
The best way to get more leads is to ensure you’re using the right metrics in your social media platforms.
Social media is all about engagement, so you should measure your engagement and retention rates.
Always look after your audience-growth rate per social media account.
You should also measure your followers’ loyalty, showing their engagement with your brand.
Conclusion
There are many social media KPIs you can use to measure the success of your social media strategy for marketing your business.
We’ve covered some of the most important ones here, including the analytics platforms you can use.
Always remember that the best ones are those that can give you the right results.
