What Are Social Media KPIs?
Think of them as little gift-packs of data that can transform your social media game from amateur to marketing pro.
Social Media Key Performance Indicators (SM KPIs) are quantifiable metrics that measure the success of any social media campaign.
How many users interact with your content? What kind of posts do best and at what times? Is your campaign in line with your business goals? Tracking social media KPIs helps you stay on top of questions like these using social media analytics.
Why Bother Tracking Social Media KPIs?
Crafting the perfect social media campaign without analyzing social media metrics is like hitting a moving target while wearing a blindfold. Instinct alone cannot guide you through the transient algorithms and consumers’ minds.
Would you rather make ballpark guesses about why your last campaign failed? Or get specific data that tells you precisely what went wrong and why, and what to change for your next campaign – providing the exact trajectory and angle to hit the bullseye.
ReportGarden’s social media analytics and customizable dashboards help you easily obtain crucial social media data in comprehensive reports featuring your choice of metrics.
- Save time when innovating
- Get comprehensive reports on your Social’s performance
- Identify key areas of improvement
- Spot historical patterns and industry trends
- Identify your audience niche, ideal platform and content type, best posting schedule, and more.
This Social Media Marketing study surveyed 300+ marketers and revealed that by measuring social media KPIs,
- 77% of marketers could tell that their marketing had been “effective to very effective” for that year, while…
- 37% were able to identify the cause of poor-performing campaigns via social media analysis.
Analysis of social media KPIs also revealed which platforms had the least engagement rates, the ideal audiences to target, and other important information that helped the marketers subjectively.
Types of Social Media KPIs
Out of the vast ocean of social media metrics to track, the top Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for any social media campaign are of 5 broad types:
Reach
Reach refers to how many people actually see the content you put out. It can be affected by quality of content, post schedules, algorithm patterns, hashtags and trends, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices, and other variable factors. Key reach metrics include:
Impressions
This is the number of times your content is displayed in a user’s feed.
It’s important to understand whether or not your content is reaching new audiences and not just existing followers, especially if your goal is to grow your brand’s online presence.
Calculation: Most platforms provide impression metrics via in-app statistics. Here’s how to make the most of X (formerly Twitter) Analytics
Follower Growth
The increase in the number of your account’s followers over a given time period.
Calculation:[(Current Followers - Previous Followers) /Total Followers] * 100
Engagement
These metrics show how your audience interacts with your content and how often. This can be affected by quality of the content, audience understanding, CTAs, and reach, among others.
Likes, Comments, Shares, Saves
Users engage with social content by liking and reacting, commenting, sharing, and saving (or bookmarking). Marketers should aim for a high number of all of these, particularly saves.
Calculation: Add up the numbers of each metric. In-app metrics of each social platform will have these numbers available in their native insights.
Click-Through Rate
The number of times users clicked on your link to visit a page or app outside of the platform that you posted on. It helps understand if your content appeals to users enough to engage them.
Calculation: (Total Clicks /Total Impressions) * 100
https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-metrics/
Conversion
Conversion metrics show how many users successfully performed the action mentioned in your content, such as visiting a website, making a purchase, downloading an app, or other actions contributing to desirable business outcomes.
Conversion Rate
The percentage of users who took the desired action in your content’s Call To Action. It’s particularly useful for performance marketing to check whether your campaigns are fulfilling your business goals.
Calculation: (Conversions / Total Clicks) * 100
Cost Per Conversion
The cost incurred to achieve a single conversion. It helps assess the ROI of your social media campaigns and identify newer channels to allocate resources to. Effective SEO and Social can help reduce your cost per conversion.
Calculation: Total Cost / Total Conversions
Bounce Rate
The percentage of users who clicked a link to visit a page but did not complete the desired action such as making a purchase or download. A high rate means your page fails to appeal to users and doesn’t drive them to pursue the desired action. Ideally, your UX and load times should be optimized to avoid high bounce rates.
Calculation: Total single-page sessions / Total entries into your website
Cost Per Click
The cost incurred for each click a user makes on your Pay Per Click (PPC) ad. This helps understand whether your PPC campaign is cost-efficient or if any changes need to be made.
Optimizing these numbers involves blending your PPC campaign with best SEO and Social Media practices to ensure that your posts drive traffic towards your goals.
Calculation: Total Cost / No. of Clicks
https://reportgarden.com/report-templates/social-media-report-template
Social Monitoring
These metrics explain your audience’s perception of your brand or business and can help create better strategies to target specific audiences and identify areas that need improvement for better performance and ROI.
Sentiment Analysis
This helps you understand how users feel about your brand by using social listening tools. It measures the emotions users express when talking about your brand.Here’s some tips on picking the right social monitoring tools to streamline the process.
https://brand24.com/blog/social-media-sentiment-analysis/
Share of Voice (SOV)
This metric represents the percentage of total online conversations about your industry or topic that mention your brand, compared to your competitors.
Calculation: [All Brand Mentions / (All Brand Mentions + All Competitor Mentions)] * 100
Financials
The metrics that help comprehend how your Social is contributing to your business goals.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Social ROI helps figure out whether the current campaign is working in alignment with your goals or if the cost is not worth the end results. This article breaks down how to calculate various paid media ROIs with ReportGarden’s ROI calculator spreadsheet.
Calculation: [(Return - Investment) / Investment] * 100
Average Revenue Per Customer (ARPC)
An average of the revenue generated by a single consumer. It helps quantify your ROI and track the success of lead conversion and retention plans.
Calculation: Total Revenue / No. of Customers
Pro-tip: Avoid the tedious manual calculations at each step of your social media analysis by using ReportGarden’s Social Media KPIs Dashboard. The customizable dashboard lets you add the widgets you want to get a report that tells the data story you want to see, with 60+ data sources to integrate. Compiling cross-platform campaign data has never been easier.
Choosing the Right Social Media KPIs
While there’s an abundance of KPIs to measure, knowing which ones are important for your business is a simple matter of alignment.
Building the perfect social media report that covers everything you need to analyze to craft the ideal campaign involves certain core factors:
- Business Objectives: Identify what you want to achieve for your business, such as increased online presence, audience connection, increased sales, etc.
- Understanding Benchmarks: Accurately understanding industry standards and historical patterns helps to maintain realism when setting your objectives.
- Specific Goals: Set a precise, measurable, and timed objective for your Social, for example, increase revenue via paid ads and organic marketing by 30% in Q3.
In short, you want your goals to be SMART:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Timely
Once your objective is clear, craft the ideal campaign to meet it using social media KPIs.
For example, a video ad campaign across multiple platforms, where you track impressions, views, likes and dislikes, comments and shares, follows, and CTR from all channels to monitor performance.
Tracking Social Media KPIs and Creating Reports in 2024
The best way to stay on top of your Social in this day of competitive marketing is through ReportGarden’s in-depth social media analytics. The sheer variety of templates to choose from makes it easy to have a report for all your needs in mere minutes.
ReportGarden offers a wide number of data sources to integrate and enables customization to ensure you get accurate numbers on the metrics that matter most to your business.
How to track KPIs using ReportGarden
1. Log in to your ReportGarden account
2. Select the dashboard that meets your needs - in this case, a Social Media KPI tracker or browse the many social media report templates to find a specific one.
3. Link the social accounts you want analyzed
4. Sit back, relax, and let ReportGarden automatically provide the information you seek.
The comprehensive metrics and detailed reports maintain visual appeal while conveying all the necessary information to keep your Social well-oiled and running. You can customize your dashboards to incorporate the data widgets you want, even across different platforms – and get an insightful report in one convenient place.
Used by marketers, freelancers, and agencies alike, ReportGarden is the leading social media analytics tool for your Social, franchise marketing, SEO, and paid ads.
If you found this article helpful, try reading this handy article on attracting more clients for your marketing agency next!
