What KPIs To Track In Social Media Analytics?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics that measure the success of your social media strategy. When you have to prove your brand’s success with data, KPIs are the first things that come to mind. 

You can define KPIs as measurable metrics that evaluate the performance of each social media channel. There are different metrics for measuring customer engagement, reach, traffic, conversation, and so on. 

Social media KPIs can help you stay on top of your social marketing strategy. Besides, they let you know whether your marketing goals are being achieved or not. In this article, we will look at the different KPIs and their role in your marketing strategies. 

Do you know: What are social listening KPIs?

What Are Social Media KPIs?

KPIs for social media are nothing but the metrics used in social media analytics. Social media analytics refers to the process of gathering customer data and interpreting it to extract meaningful insights. Social listening is also an integral part of social media analytics these days. Consider the following things while using social media analytics KPIs:

1. Role of KPIs 

Marketers usually use social media analytics dashboards to analyze the performance of their posts and campaigns. To evaluate performance, they define the metrics that they wish to track. Social media KPIs help them determine whether the intended purpose of their social media strategy is being met or not. 

2. Relationship Between KPIs and Marketing Goals

Key Performance Indicators for social media analytics depend on your marketing goals. If your goal is to increase sales, you can measure metrics related to the conversion rate. If your goal is to increase audience reach, metrics related to customer reach will come into play.

Why Is There a Need for Tracking KPIs in Social Media Analytics?

The following points assert the need for integrating KPIs into social media analytics.

1. To Identify the Best-Performing Strategy 

Brands are fiercely competitive when it comes to achieving their marketing goals. To stay ahead in the market, you must experiment with different marketing strategies. Social media KPIs help you identify the best-performing social media strategies. They do so by using metrics that are calculated with the help of analytical tools. 

Suppose that you set up a campaign on Facebook to increase brand awareness. In this case, the metric “Reach” allows you to evaluate the performance of your campaign. Let us say your goal was to increase your followers by 5,000. Now, KPI reach will help you determine whether the campaign helped your follower count or not. 

2. Measures Ad, Post, and Campaign Performance

Apart from audience reach, other Key Performance Indicators for social media analytics can track audience engagement, conversion rates, and other things. Other than posts and campaigns, KPIs are also used to measure the performance of social media ads. 

3. Analyzes Social Sentiment 

KPIs act as social proof while validating your engagement, reach, and conversion levels. Analyzing customer reactions closely can also reveal their underlying sentiments. 

Shares and likes are positive reactions that convey that your customers are happy. When customers dislike your content or hide it from their news feed, it indicates a negative sentiment around your brand. 

Customer sentiments hold great value as they determine the outcome of your business. KPIs help you track these sentiments based on numbers.

Social listening metrics like customer satisfaction feedback reveal how well customers receive your service/product. The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) indicates whether customers are satisfied with your customer service. Some other indicators help you monitor social sentiment, brand visibility, and other useful parameters. 

Read about: Everything About Sentiment Analysis-Your Ultimate Guide

Four Types of KPIs to Track in Social Media Analytics

The social media KPIs should focus on four key areas of your social media strategies. These areas are brand awareness, engagement, conversions, and customer satisfaction. Let us learn a little more about these types of KPIs for social media analytics.

1. Brand Awareness (Reach)

Every day, thousands of brand accounts are created on social media. Each brand tries to make itself noticeable through consistent marketing efforts. Therefore, making people aware of your brand’s existence is itself a big challenge in social media marketing. 

If your marketing goal is to increase brand awareness, your social media KPIs should be related to it. Impressions, reach, the share of voice, and brand mentions reveal important statistics regarding your brand’s awareness. 

Startups are more concerned with creating brand awareness because they are visible in the market. Established brands focus on using their brand awareness to increase engagement and brand perception. 

2. Engagement 

Once the customers start knowing about your brand and products/services, they start engaging with your posts. Creating engaging and useful content should be at the top of your priority list. Engaged customers take the required action, like liking your post, subscribing to your page, or buying your product.

Likes, comments, and engagement rates are the basic social media KPIs to measure social media engagement.

3. Conversion 

Conversion becomes easy when you engage your customers and encourage them to take the required action. KPIs like conversion rate indicate whether customers are responding to your Call To Action (CTA) statements. 

Social media KPIs like Click Through Rate (CTR), Bounce Rate, Cost Per Click (CPC), etc., reveal important statistics regarding your conversion strategy. 

Established brands already have sufficient online visibility. The audience recognizes the brand and engages with its content. So, these brands focus on increasing their conversion rate. 

4. Customer Experience 

Customer experience KPIs monitor how your customers perceive your brand. Their sentiments can be reflected through testimonials, reviews, and feedback. You also have the CSAT Score, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and some other metrics to evaluate customer satisfaction. 

KPIs for Reach

The following are the most commonly used social media KPIs for evaluating customer reach.

1. Impression 

Impression reveals how many times your post, video, ad, or campaign has appeared on a webpage or in a customer’s timeline/feeds. If one customer views the content multiple times, all the views are counted as impressions. 

Impressions are simply views. They do not indicate whether the customers read, click, or engage with your content. Yet they are useful in determining whether your post has reached a wider audience or not. 

2. Post Reach 

Post reach indicates how many people have viewed your post. Unlike impressions, it calculates the number of people who have viewed your post. 

If one person views your post multiple times, the post’s reach will only be counted as one. It is so because post reach is calculated by evaluating the number of accounts that have viewed your post. Due to this reason, post reach is always lower than impressions. 

Post reach is one of the most important KPIs for social media analytics because it measures the actual reach of your content. So, it is pre-included in most social media analytical tools and dashboards. 

3. Web Traffic 

Web traffic measures the performance of your posts, which comprise your website links. If a customer clicks on your posts and gets redirected to one of your website’s pages, the web traffic KPI will increase by one. 

Web traffic can be easily evaluated through Google Analytics. Most brands track this metric using website builder tools. 

You can use web traffic as a social media KPI for these things:

• To measure the sales campaign’s performance 
• When you promote your landing pages through your campaigns or posts
• To check how the audience receives your content on social media 

4. Share of Voice 

SOV or Share Of Voice, evaluates your brand’s visibility across multiple social media channels as compared to that of your competitor’s brands. It gives you a complete idea of your brand’s position in the market. 

Share Of Voice can be calculated by dividing your brand’s mentions against the total mentions of your competitors. This answer is then multiplied by 100 to get the SOV percentage. 

Suppose that your brand’s mentions on a particular platform were 30 for a week. Now, if the total number of brand mentions for your competitors was 90, you can measure SOV with the below formula:

SOV = (Brand mentions/total mentions) x 100 

= (30/90) x 100 

= (⅓) x 100 

= 33.33% 

A higher SOV percentage indicates that your brand’s visibility is on the higher side. 

KPIs for Engagement 

The following are the crucial KPIs for engagement:

1. Number of Clicks 

Clicks measure the engagement levels created by your social accounts. They indicate that the customers not only view your content but also interact with it.

You can include links in your posts to encourage your customers to take specific action. You can use the links to increase your website traffic, redirect the audience to your landing page, or for any other reason. A higher number of clicks indicates that your purpose behind creating the post or campaign was successful. 

Clicks can be calculated for each post or for all posts in a week or month. When the audience clicks on the like or share button, that is also counted as a click. 

2. Likes, Shares, and Comments 

Likes, shares, and comments are also key social media metrics as they measure the engagement levels of your post. Likes or favorites indicate that your post is being appreciated by customers. Shares are even better because they mean that the customers are thoroughly impressed by your content. 

Shares also increase your brand’s awareness and engagement levels. It is so because each share helps you reach a new customer. 

The name for shares can be different on different platforms. Twitter names it a “Retweet,” Facebook calls it a “Share,” and Pinterest calls it a “Save.” 

Comments made by customers on your live streams, posts, and other forms of content are also crucial. The number of comments received on your post reveals whether the post was engaging or not. 

Comments can be further classified into negative, positive, and neutral comments. As a part of your social media strategy, you should reply to each customer’s comment. It shows that you care for your customers and address their concerns and queries withon priority. 

3. Brand Mentions 

Customers mention your brand name in comments or use one of your brand’s hashtags. By tracking the brand mentions, you can analyze the overall customer sentiment regarding your brand. 

You can use a social media management suite and tool to track brand mentions. Brand mentions can be collected from all social media platforms. At times, most of your brand mentions can be collected from a particular platform. It indicates that you are popular on that particular platform. 

4. Social Share 

Social share means the number of times a specific piece of content has been shared on social media. If the social share is higher, it signifies that the audiences have received the content well. 

5. Average Engagement Rate 

The average engagement rate (AER) reveals how engaging your social media post is. It takes all the forms of engagement, like likes, comments, shares, etc., into account. The formula used to calculate the Average Engagement Rate is mentioned below:

Average Engagement Rate = (Total Shares, Likes, and Comments/Total Followers) x 100

A higher AER percentage indicates that your post is engaging. 

KPIs for Conversion 

The social media analytics KPIs to track for conversion are given below.

1. Conversion Rate 

The conversion rate measures the events where the customers take a specific action as predetermined by the marketer. 

Suppose that the purpose of a campaign was to encourage the audience to sign up for a brand’s newsletter. Here, conversion rate refers to the number of customers who signed up for the newsletter. 

The main purpose behind social media campaigns is to increase leads or improve revenue. This makes conversion rate one of the most important KPIs for social media analytics. 

Social media analytics tools track conversion rates and provide you with the necessary feedback regarding the campaign’s performance. 

2. Bounce Rate 

The number of website visitors that left the website after viewing just one page can be calculated by using the bounce rate. A higher bounce rate means that your website is not capable of generating a positive user experience. 

The formula to calculate a website’s bounce rate is given below:

Bounce rate = Number of sessions during which only one webpage was viewed/website’s total sessions 

Use Google Analytics to check the bounce rate of your website. It is also possible to check the bounce rate for individual web pages. 

3. Sales Revenue 

Sales revenue reveals the number of clicks from social media that were converted into purchases. It also reveals the total revenue that you earned from the sales campaign. 

E-commerce platforms use this social media metric to measure the income they generate from advertisements and marketing. 

4. Cost Per Click 

CPC, or Cost Per Click, refers to the exact amount payable to the social media channel for one click. The number of target users, day of promotion, time of promotion, etc. determine the CPC for a specific ad campaign. 

CPC helps you determine your advertising budget and lets you make decisions regarding advertisements. Platforms like Facebook charge money based on CPM, i.e., Cost Per Thousand Impressions. CPC and CPM can be tracked using an advanced social analytics tool or platform. 

5. Click-Through Rate 

CTR, or Click-Through Rate, measures the percentage of viewers who clicked on your post or ad campaign. CTR is important because it determines whether your CTA statement is generating enough responses or not. 

To calculate CTR, you can divide the number of clicks received through the post or ad by its total impressions. 

KPIs for Customer Experience

The following are the social media KPIs that help you determine your customer experience:

1. Cost Per Lead 

The cost per lead is the money you spend on acquiring a single lead through ads and campaigns. It is an important KPI for social media analytics as it determines your overall marketing budget. 

A higher CPL indicates that you should improve your content strategy. A lower CPL suggests that your lead-generation campaign or advertisement is effective. 

2. Customer Lifetime Value 

CLTV, or Customer Lifetime Value, calculates the revenue that you have generated from a single customer over a specific period. A higher CLTV suggests that your customer retention and loyalty strategies are paying off. 

To calculate CLTV, you just have to multiply the total value generated by a customer by their average lifespan. 

In Summary 

These were some of the best KPIs for social media strategy-making. We recommend you align your marketing goals with the relevant KPIs. To evaluate the customer data and derive meaningful insights from it, you can use Konnect Insights. It is a customer experience management suite that encompasses all the analytical tools you need for managing customer data and campaigns. 

Konnect Insights gives you an intuitive dashboard that comprises all the KPIs needed for measuring the performance of your campaigns. Its user-friendly dashboard and BI tools help you fine-tune your social media strategies. Using platforms like these will help you generate the maximum value from your social media marketing plans.