Social media marketing is one of our generation’s most valued tools for growing a business, developing an audience, and increasing sales and conversions. Just like with any other marketing channel, it is important to have a clear strategy behind your efforts so that you know what to expect when you start to see results.
This is where social media metrics and KPIs come in. However, with so many areas to track data and determine your KPIs, it can be hard to know what tools can best gauge the effectiveness of your strategy, or what constitutes a successful campaign for your brand.
We’ll take you through a few of the most important tools across all the major social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn to show you the benefits of each one. In this way, you can back up your strategy and use real figures to leverage budget increases and demonstrate the tangible impact that your online campaigns are having.
Engagement
In almost every social media campaign, one of the most fundamental measuring metrics is engagement. You’ll want to track the number of likes, comments and shares that your posts are receiving over time. This information, which is provided directly inside each platform for business use, is vital because it allows you to not only track the success of your campaign, but it allows you to create content for future posts that capitalizes on the success of prior efforts.
Reach
Reach is another important tool to view the size of your audience and determine if your paid or organic efforts are achieving the results you’re expecting. Rather than tracking the number of likes, reach is used to display the size of the audience that has come across your posts, and can be used to compare against the overall number of conversions achieved to measure the impact that your efforts have had.
Community Metrics
New follower’s metrics are a great way to measure your community growth and watch as it evolves thanks to your campaigns. Within community metrics, you can also view the demographics of your audience to ensure you are reaching your target market and viewing things like gender, age and location.
Of course, we know that there are countless other helpful metrics available to help you track your efforts that cannot be overlooked, such as ROI, share of voice, response time, conversion rate, mentions. What’s most important to note is that each brand will have its own unique needs and may decide to only track the metrics that they find most helpful.
By clearly defining your social media campaign metrics and using them to gauge the results, you’ll be able to justify your strategy and will know when changes must be made, helping you to achieve success for your brand.
Don’t forget to check out the latest updates from your favorite social media platforms below:
You can now share a tweet directly from Twitter onto your Instagram story directly from the Twitter app via a new integration.
WhatsApp is testing a new feature called View Once Messages, which will allow you to send messages that will automatically be deleted after they’ve been viewed once. Read more here.
Instagram may soon allow all users to attach links in their story via “stickers” which would replace the current “swipe up” feature used by influencer.