Social media has spread its wings far and wide to foster its denser shadow on individuals and corporations. The current years have proved the significance of social media. We have virtual schools, workplaces, libraries, universities, shopping centers, get-to-gathers, and even health centers. Social media has ingrained itself in the life of almost every person. For many, the first thing to do after getting up is checking out the Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter updates.
Being used as a tool for communication and building social relationships is only one aspect of social media. The other side of social media is of commercial nature; you reach your audiences and strengthen your return-on-investment (ROI). Understandably, it is not easy to sustain continuous revenue growth with specific followers and fewer likes, but as the entire competition has shifted itself into the virtual world, there is a need to employ the right social media KPIs.
These are the KPIs for social media that ensure total health of your business under stronger effect of modern social media marketing. These KPIs could do a great deal in terms of
- Generation of new users for your website
- Generation of leads
- Enhance your brand recognition
- Retain your existing customers
- Improve the rate of conversion
- Increase sales volume
- Add to the revenues
All of these factors define the real worth of your business by influencing your proposed objectives. Though there are various metrics to measure your success on social media, just a few questions could help you decide on social KPIs for a specific marketing campaign.
- Are you approaching the targeted onlookers?
- Are you effectively interacting with the desired populace?
- What is the nature of your product or service?
- How many of your social media followers are curious about your product or service?
- How many of them finally choose to be consumers of your products or services?
These questions are simple and straight. What does KPIs mean in marketing depends on business needs, demographics and preferences of the target customers. These questions meet the SMART objectives:
Specific
Measureable
Attainable
Realistic
Time-bound
These considerations lead a social media strategist to define the right social media KPIs under four categories.
- Access supporting KPIs
- Engagement focused KPIs
- Lead generating KPIs
- Consumer related KPIs
Access supporting KPIs
Regular analysis of social insights establishes a set of social media marketing KPIs for a specific campaign. Access to the target audiences is the first step toward the success of any business. Never mind how old this criterion is but it is an all time green idea.
Before you continue with deciding on KPIs, know about the real power of social media as a marketing tool.
- 85 billion users publish posts on social media every year
- 65 percent of the total population in UK uses social media
- 78 percent of the 45 million active users buy online
- 92 percent youngsters follow brands on social media
- 60 percent of the people in UK read social media reviews before making a buying decision
- Most Facebook users in UK fall under the age bracket of 25-35 years
In business, it matters how far your messages are reaching, but what matters most is either they are reaching the right audiences! As even if thousands of uninterested audiences see your marketing message, it might be a futile exercise.
Here comes the twist, on social media though you can know that 2K people liked your product or service – which is related to engagement and not reach – it is all based on a random guess that how many people viewed your post. It is hard to estimate the real reach of your product, it could be misleading therefore. Use following KPIs for social media to calculate reach for better marketing decisions.
- Your followers are the members of your social family
One certain criterion to ensure access to your product or service is determined by the number of followers your social media pages have. These are your audiences who are interested to know about your products and services and so they are viewing your posts by subscribing themselves.
- Impressions on your social posts are noteworthy
Impressions let you analyze how many times the post of your product or service has appeared on someone’s newsfeed or timeline. This appearance might exist because either they are following you or their acquaintances on social media are following you. For example, if a person you follow likes any post on Facebook, it appears on your timeline as well. Impressions, this way, help you estimate the nearest number of access. Publishing your posts considering the best possible time to post can significantly enhance the reach or impressions.
- Traffic volume on social media pages is desirable
The third criterion to measure the reach of your marketing voice is through the traffic data. Traffic volume lets you know how much traffic from social media is visiting your page. A developed and highly interactive social media page would translate into huge traffic on your website. Various tools allow you to analyze the social media traffic coming to your page and at the same time help you increase the reach of individual posts.
Engagement focused KPIs
Engagement of social media users is vital for the growth of your revenues and thus development of your business. This social KPI is unique as it impacts the performance of all other social media KPIs. Sound engagement is a catalyst that enhances reach, followers, and customers.
Social media KPIs examples suggest that a declining engagement is fatal to your marketing strategy irrespective of the fact that post reach is good. Even if you have a pool of followers they will be barely interested in buying your products because they would not find it attractive due to the low engagement of your post. Following are the reasons of low engagement of marketing related posts:
- Low number of likes, shares and comments your posts carry
- Weak, unclear and less interactive marketing content
- Unimpressive content strategy
An engaging post automatically generates a greater number of leads. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram give high weightage to the level of engagement and directly associate it with the quality of your product and popularity of your business. Here are a few important KPIs for social media.
- Clicks are catalysts
People click on some link depending on the usefulness and beauty of the title and image. The more appealing an image is and more eloquently capturing a title is, the more people will click the post. Followers mostly click on every new post of yours but the new audience will visit your page only if that got curious after seeing your post.
Now there are cases to consider. If a representative post does not get an appreciable number of clicks, you could work by trying new titles and different images for your post to increase the level of engagement. You would need to work on the remaining content of your post. If both likes and clicks are in alignment, here you go, keep rocking!
- Likes witness engagement
Social media Key Performance Indicators start from the number of likes a certain post claims. As per studies, people are normally inclined to the posts with more likes. Many think that being popular means being right in terms of quality. Further, social media algorithms are designed to give top slots to the post with huge likes. We would recommend you to the individuals and businesses for they are really awesome in building your Facebook or any other social profile in a meaningful way.
- Social media Shares set communication layers
From clicks to likes and likes to shares, social media is changing its meaning. Getting likes is termed as a passive response now. The number of ‘shares’ your post gets determines the reach as well as real engagement of your social media post. Likes might be an unconscious habit of many, but sharing a post is a conscious decision.
- Comments are the first step towards recommendations
Here is an interesting sub-KPI to consider! On social media posts, getting a comment is important even if it is negative. The essence of being on social media is to be ‘social’ or in other words to engage a greater number of people from around the globe. Only relevant persons with a specific interest in your product would hit the comment button which implies that your marketing strategy is going the right way.
- Hashtag is the new way of social media marketing
Hashtag is a culture! It implies that many of the people are talking about your products and services. Getting huge number of hashtags is a hard nut to crack but if your brand is getting the mentions and hashtags, it means you are hitting the nail on the head.
- Never ignore profile visits
Before going into details of this option, it is pertinent to mention that all social media platforms do not offer this option. Though it is not a sound indicator like visiting the main website of your company or business, yet it ensures how many people on social media are interested in your products. Consider and track profile visits regularly! Importance of KPIs could hardly be denied in the contemporary corporate competition and e-commerce or SaaS culture.
- Active followers are asset
Knock! Knock! Never fully rely on the total number of your followers. What if 30 percent of your followers are no longer active? Would it give you some kind of benefit? Of course no! These are the active social followers that might come across your product and like, comment, or share it. Active social followers help businesses realize about importance of social KPIs in the long-run.
But how to define an active follower? An active social media follower is the one who has at least logged in during the last 30 days and has engaged with your content somehow. To make sure your followers are actually active real humans and not fake accounts, you could join a social media user directory like Twiends. When you add your Twitter account it will connect with over 50k other users allowing you to grow your followers quickly and naturally.
Lead generating KPIs
Now as you are done with the reach and engagement dimensions of your social media posts, leads come next. At this stage, you know about the number of likes, shares, and comments your social media posts are getting. You know about the number of people interacting with your website and enjoying the quality of your posts and content. But what’s next? Is it enough? What about the ultimate purpose of doing all this? How would you earn revenues?
From fans to clients
A sound and sustainable return on investment is the ultimate goal of a business. It just depends on how many of your followers are exhibiting the interest to buy your product or service. There is a huge possibility that your business has a significant presence on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. The reason might be because people love your beautiful and enticing posts. But the challenge is how to convert the fans into your clients!
- Analyze the data and try to derive the meaning
- Study the general behaviour of your fans
- Forecast how many followers could buy from you
From likes and shares to sales
How to generate sales from these likes and shares? Unless people do not move from your posts on social media to your website, the mission of translating likes into sales sounds tough. Obviously, if you are unable to generate leads from these posts, then either you are using the wrong platform or your content is faulty. Generating leads from your post is the most needed thing if you really want to impact your ROI. Better to hire an agency to design and run your social media marketing!
- Usually, a wise analysis and categorization of your followers give you a glimpse of how to sell
- See how many fans fill in the form, ask for a quotation, subscribe for a newsletter or download something from your website.
Customer related KPIs
So here comes the final step. Till now you have worked on enhancing the reach of your brand, ameliorating the engagement level, and enriching the leads to secure lucrative revenues for your business. How much revenue you would ultimately be able to earn depends on the number of clients acquired and retained. For creation of a sustainable and longer rapport with your customers, make your customers feel like a star.
But this does not end here! Your new customers might be fewer than your old followers but you have to keep working on your content and retain the interested customers or new fans for a little longer. This is how it works.
- Pay attention to acquire new customers
- Compare the performance of social selling platforms you are using
- Redefine your marketing strategy where necessary
Keep on discovering the virtual world of social media!
Keep one thing in mind, the virtual world is highly dynamic and thus highly competitive. Social KPIs vary from platform to platform to some extent. All these social media KPIs examples need professional analysis and rigorous research.
- Allocate sufficient time on social media marketing platforms
- Scan your competition on social media avenues
- See what people like most in your industry
