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Over the years, social media has grown into one of the most powerful and affordable online marketing tools, one that you can leverage to expand your brand’s reach, engage with a global audience, and drive traffic and sales on your website. But you need to know what you’re doing. Like any lucrative marketing method, social media can only bear the right fruit if you act on solid data, so there is a real need to take a more calculated approach to social media management.
You can do this with the help of actionable reports derived from the most important metrics and KPIs on every platform. When you collate the data, you can tailor your approach to fit the exact needs of your audience, and thus inspire them to become your loyal brand followers. Here are some of the most important KPIs you shouldn’t ignore.
Your follower count and reach
The first and easiest KPIs to keep track of is your follower count. This metric, although relative in terms of its value, is an important indicator of your brand’s overall reach on social media. Quite simply, increasing your follower count over time is one of the most effective ways to build brand awareness, and it’s a solid way of getting more business to your doorstep or your website.
Keep in mind, though, that your follower count is only an indicator of your brand’s potential because, without engagement, it won’t have any tangible benefits for your business. Your Facebook page might have half a million followers, but if less than 1% of your followers engage with your brand occasionally, then you’re not achieving your long-term goals. Use this KPI to gain a sense of direction, and set a foundation for your next engagement campaign.
Web traffic from social media
A more crucial metric that portrays the effectiveness of your social media management strategy is web traffic. This is the number of people that land on your website by clicking on links from your social media posts, sponsored advertisements, and social media campaigns in general. Getting people from your social media page to your landing page is the first step in the conversion process, although you should leverage social media selling to achieve this goal as well.
However, don’t be fooled into thinking that engagement equals web traffic, as you could have a thriving brand-follower relationship on social media without anyone actually clicking on your CTAs. Be sure to monitor the amount of traffic coming in from your social media pages via Google Analytics in order to fine-tune your calls to action and even create deals and promotions to act as complementary incentives.
Monitoring the social media buzz
For any of your marketing campaigns to work, you need to create actionable reports on your customers’ behavior, the current trends in your industry, your brand’s social status across all social media networks, and more. In essence, you need to accrue knowledge about your brand and the industry that’s relevant and factual in order to optimize your approach to social media management and marketing.
To achieve this, you will need to listen carefully to the heartbeat of the social media world, and leverage social media analytics and monitoring to find out how the online media portrays your brand, how the market perceives it, and how it’s currently operating within an external market. These insights will prove invaluable to your marketing strategy as a whole, as well as your PR and communication strategies. Knowing when, where, how, and why your brand is coming up conversations across the SM realm is the key to brand engagement, loyalty, and trust.
The engagement rate on every channel
Speaking of engagement, this is another crucial metric that relies on several distinct KPIs. These include clicks, shares, mentions, likes, and comments. Essentially, you can use these data points to gauge the potential and performance of your entire social media campaigns, relative to your campaign’s goals, of course. That said, you should always compare your engagement rate to your web traffic and conversion metrics in order to assess the true ROI of social media engagement.
These engagement KPIs can tell you a lot about the trustworthiness of your brand in the competitive market, as the number of mentions, clicks, and shares indicate just how much your audience is willing to engage with your brand and make a purchase. Likes, on the other hand, will mostly indicate the performance of a single post, but they are nonetheless a good indicator of your brand’s potential to convert customers down the line. And finally, remember that tracking your engagement KPIs creates a unique opportunity to generate a lot of leads fairly quickly.
Tracking and optimizing conversions
In the end, it all comes down to how much money you spend versus how much you earn, also known as ROI. Every business decision should have a projected ROI, and your social media strategy is no exception. If your primary goal on social media is to boost conversions (be it via your website or social selling), then your conversion rate is easily your most important metric.
That said, conversion also has several KPIs you should monitor: sales revenue, lead conversion rate, and non-revenue conversions. The first and second KPIs are pretty straightforward, and you can track them on your Google Analytics dashboard. The non-revenue conversion rate, on the other hand, is something not many marketers tend to focus on, and they should. This is an important KPI because it serves as a quality lead generator. Instead of buying something, people might sign up for your newsletter, or download your free eBook – providing you with quality leads and a clear insight into the performance of your social strategies.
Final thoughts
Social media is a powerful marketing tool, but you can only unlock its true potential if you leverage the relevant data to fine-tune your social strategies. Be sure to monitor these key social media metrics and you will have no problem improving brand reach, loyalty, and of course, conversions.
