Social Media KPIs You Should be Tracking

There are a lot of social media metrics available, but each organization uses them in different ways. Also, there’s a lot of chatter around which social media KPIs matter the most. To answer this question, you first need to understand which social media KPIs matter most to help your marketing team reach its goals. Every marketing team has different goals and measurements of success. Therefore, your social media goals should be tailored to your specific organization.

To plan how you’ll implement your marketing strategy, we always recommend creating a strategic planning dashboard. By doing so, you can set numerical targets against timelines and keep them where your whole team can see. For example when setting social media KPIs, you might create a social media dashboard split into organic and paid traffic and then split into campaign level. This way, you can easily understand how effective your social media strategy is and how it’s contributing to your wider business objectives.

What are social media KPIs and how can they help your business?

Social media metrics can help you determine the performance and ROI of your social media strategy. To track these KPIs, you must ensure you are tracking the right ones—and we're not talking just followers or likes!

Social media KPIs are the key performance indicators you should focus on setting to keep track of your social media marketing efforts. Whether your goal is to drive traffic to your site or increase sales, these KPIs should focus on driving those results.

Social Media KPI #1: Reach

Reach is a marketing metric that’s been around for a long time. While we wouldn’t recommend you focus on reach as your main focus, it’s still important to measure how effective your social campaigns are at reaching new audiences. Put simply, reach is the number of people who have seen your content. If you want to scale your social campaigns and compete against bigger companies in your industry, reach can help you monitor how well you’re pacing toward reaching that goal.

To measure reach, track KPIs like: 

• Impression

• Cost per impression

• Website traffic

Social Media KPI #2: Engagement 

Engagement is probably the most important KPI for measuring your social media marketing efforts. It refers to how many people have taken action on your posts, by clicking, liking, commenting and so on. Having an engaged audience means you’re reaching the right target market. If your following or impressions are high but engagement is low, chances are you aren’t reaching your desired audience. Or your content isn’t resonating with them.

Engagement is vital when it comes to social media strategy, because each platform has its own algorithm. If your engagement is high, the algorithms think that you are more relevant and helpful and will therefore show your post to more users who fit a similar mould. And this means you’re onto a winner!

To measure engagement, track KPIs like: 

• Likes and comments

• Shares and saves

• Brand mentions

Social Media KPI #3: Leads

Building community on social media can be a great way to build brand awareness. But what about when it comes to the next stage of the funnel?

The reason your brand is doing any social media marketing is to reach new customers. Lead generation is where you should really focus your efforts. How many of those engaged followers actually want to buy from your company? Some companies with small followings may make more money from social media than those with larger followings.

You need to plan how you’ll move people from social media to your marketing funnel, so that they can become customers. Social media is a great way to convert cold leads into warm leads and generate loyal fans; this is highly dependent on the type of company you are and type of products. For example, B2B deals take longer to close than for an ecommerce B2C brand; however, social media might be one of the best ways you generate leads for an ecommerce B2C brand.

To measure leads, set KPIs like: Improve the customer journey by reducing the bounce rate from social media channels by 20%. 

Create a single dashboard to track your KPIs and social media.

Our tool helps you track if you're reaching your KPIs and areas of improvement. By aggregating it into one platform, your whole team can see how close you are to reaching your KPIs and can tweak social media campaigns accordingly.