What Are Social Media KPIs? How Do You Measure & Improve Them?

What Are Social Media KPIs? How Do You Measure & Improve Them?

You may have the best online content in the world but if you can’t accurately measure your social media KPIs how do you know you’re definitely getting it right?
Guessing which particular platform will work best for your brand isn’t difficult, each one meets a different need and targets a different type of target audience persona (which is why it pays to write unique content for each social media channel you use).
But you can’t know for sure if your social content strategy is working until you measure performance using Key Performance Indicators.

What Are Social Media KPIs?

Deciding which social KPIs to measure is almost as much of an art as creating the content in the first place. There are hundreds of tools capable of measuring thousands of different metrics so you need to identify which social media KPIs are important to your brand.
Your individual goals will determine the KPIs you should be measuring, and they can be broken down into the following categories:

  • Brand Awareness/Reach
  • Engagement/Leads
  • Website Traffic/Visitor Personas (target audience)
  • Conversion/new clients/sales

For Brand Awareness the KPIs are fairly straightforward, you’re looking at measuring followers, mentions, target audience (persona) sentiment, content sharing, website visits, likes and shares on social media platforms etc.
Being active on social media will ensure greater brand awareness, while positive perceptions of your business can be reinforced by measuring – and improving – the next essential set of social media KPIs: Engagement.
Having a large reach with low engagement is a bad sign because it shows that you don’t have a marketing message or content that resonates. Reaching millions of people means nothing if they aren’t interested in what you offer.

As long as your audience is engaged, no matter how small that audience is, it will grow organically and generate more potential leads.
Online followers then turn into Website Traffic. The more people visit your brand website, the greater the chance you have to convert them into new customers or clients. You need to measure the amount of referrals your site gets from social platforms.
Once you have visitors, you need to keep them engaged and move them into Conversion – whether this be through them buying a product, signing up for a service or becoming a new client.
You shouldn’t expect to have high new customer rates from social media because a lot of your followers will be current customers and another significant portion are only interested in the content. That’s just the way it goes.
However, checking which social media platforms work best for your brand is vital. This shows you where to focus more time and it shows you where your best leads are coming from. Tracking customer acquisition and conversion rates from social media is necessary to ensure you can honestly measure the ROI your brand is getting from the work put in.

How to Set Social Media KPIs

While all of the above are smart suggestions, you should only focus on the social media KPIs that are relevant for the platforms your brand is active on and which have direct relevance to your target personas.
Concentrate on the metrics which answer the following questions:

  1. Are you reaching the right personas?
  2. Are you engaging with the right personas?
  3. How many of your social media fans are inquiring about your product or service?
  4. How many of them actually become customers?

Every audience is different. If your ideal persona isn’t inclined to hit the like button but is still giving you new business then it’s a win. Track what makes sense and actually reflects success.

See what Veracity can do for you or the brands you represent by getting a free traffic audit.

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